


Saturn Ascends (Comes Round Again)

by ficlicious



Category: Avengers (Comics), Captain America (Comics), Iron Man (Comic), Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Altered Mental States, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Attempted Mental Coercion, Canon Compliant Dead Characters, Constructed Reality, Developing Relationship, Embedded Images, Extremis Tony Stark, Fix-It, Hydra Steve Rogers, ISTFG MARVEL, M/M, Not Secret Empire Compliant, Phoenix Tony Stark, Post AvX, Post Civil War II, Prince Charming Clause, Tony Stark Is a Good Bro, phenomenal cosmic power, so many bird puns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-01
Updated: 2017-06-01
Packaged: 2018-11-05 11:55:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11012937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ficlicious/pseuds/ficlicious
Summary: His skin is steaming slightly in the air, smoke rising from his fingertips in lazy, thin swirls, and over the black material of the flight suit he woke up in, right where his RT disk contours his chest, is a silver-blue Phoenix emblem spread bold and proud.He stares at it for a long time, touches it gingerly, traces the lines. “Okay,” he says, disbelieving and incredulous. “What thefuck?”-----In which Tony Stark wakes up from his coma, becomes a Phoenix host, discovers all is not right in Star-Spangled Man Land, and decides to do something about it. Post-Hydra Cap fix it.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KakushiMiko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KakushiMiko/gifts).



> I never can resist a good, complicated AU with many moving parts, especially when it's Miko's gorgeous artwork that goes with it. _Saturn Ascends_ assumes some familiarity with the Avengers vs. X-Men, Civil War II and Hydra Cap storylines. If you're not familiar, it's okay. I've summed it up for you in the end notes, so you can skip down there if you like.
> 
> While I did read the entire run of CW2 and AvX, I only managed to stomach two issues of _Captain America: Steve Rogers_ before I decided I had enough information to write this fic properly. I am blissfully still unaware of the majority of the Secret Empire fuckery, so we're just going with Kobik having rewritten Steve's personal reality instead of whatever bullshit they backtracked on.
> 
> Let's get this fix-it started. Posted in chapter form because last minute editing sucks and I'm impatient.

__

_Saturn comes back around to show you everything_  
_Lets you choose what you will and will not see_  
_And then drags you down like a stone, or lifts you up again_  
_Spits you out like a child, light and innocent._  
_Saturn comes back around. Lifts you up like a child_  
_Or drags you down like a stone to consume you til you_ _  
_ _Choose to let this go. Choose to let this go._

Tool, “The Grudge”

**oOoOoOo**

In his cocoon, he dreams.

\------

He’s jury-rigged this thing in _hours,_ and he should have had days. Weeks. Decades. Decades would be best. He’s had no time to test it, no time to walk it through its paces. It’s been slapped together as carefully as he had the chance to do, and in all likelihood will kill him when he powers it up.

He’s been dead before. He likes his odds.

The mech doesn’t kill him on power-up, and despite a few hair-raising moments of alarms and warnings flashing, it proves space worthy too, which is always a worry of his. After all the shit he’s been through, Tony Stark is not going to get taken out of the boss battle by something as pedestrian as vacuum exposure before the fight even starts. So it’s nice when his tech behaves and the seals hold as they should.

The Phoenix is on him faster than he can blink, and _goddamn it’s huge._ Tony’s heard the stories from Xavier’s group, knows what happened to Jean Grey, but somehow, the reality of its mind-blowingly, thought-meltingly _immense fucking size_ has escaped him until now. He’s floating in space in what is quite possibly the largest Iron Man armor he’s ever created, a goddamn Gundam if he were inclined to play to the millennial crowd. There are literal gods and forces of nature and superpowers at his back on the surface of the Moon, and the Phoenix makes them all look like a child’s plastic green army men.

Even with gods on speed dial, he's never been religious, but he's a mouse before a lion right now, and he finds himself praying as he starts the firing sequence. Risk assessment and threat calculations are laughably impossible, but he tries to make them anyway, force of habit, ingrained behaviour. The Phoenixbuster fires, and Tony is blinded momentarily by the brilliance of the flare.

Spots dance in front of his eyes, gold and orange and white and red, and he wastes precious seconds blinking them away, peering through the viewscreen, scanning for any sign of the big orange bird. Only a few stray globules of plasma and fading trails of fire catch his eye. Triumph spreads through him, and he grins broadly. “Hail Hydra,” he whispers, and thanks the Red Skull for….

**_...Wait. That's not how it happened._ **

The Phoenixbuster fires, and Tony is blinded momentarily by the brilliance of the flare. Before the spots can fully clear from his eyes, alarms start whooping again, radiation warnings and impact alerts, and the backwash of Phoenix fire washes over him, through him, and just for a moment, he's burning alive. It's in his skin, his lungs, his blood, his brain, and he can't breathe, can't think, can't scream.

And then it's gone, like it never was. And Tony puts it out of his mind, because his comms are working again, and Steve is reporting the five X-Men are Phoenix hosts, and he knows with dread certainty that he's going to be very, very busy for the foreseeable future.

_\-----_

"Tonight is a very special night, Tony,” Mother says, and leans over to adjust his suit and tie. Her hands smell like that expensive moisturizing cream she favors, and he closes his eyes to breathe it in, because it always makes him feel safe. “Do you know why?” 

“Dad’s business associates want to meet me,” he says, and preens under his mother's soft pat on the head. “And Dad thinks it's time I learned more about the organization.”

“That's right,” Mother says as she smooths his hair back. “Hydra has been very good to our family, and as your father's heir—”

**_That didn't happen at all._ **

“As your father's heir—”

**_Stop it._ **

“As your father's—”

**_STOP. IT._ **

**__ **

_ You're ruining everything! He needs you to be like us! _

**_I'm not like anyone. Get out of my head._ **

_ You're so mean! Why can't you just do what you're told? _

**_Never been one of my strengths. Ask anyone. Now get out of my head._ **

_ You can't make go. _

**_Is that a fact?_ **

_ What are you… No! Don't! You're not supposed to do that! _

**_Sweetheart, that could be the title of my autobiography. Now_ ** **_GET OUT OF MY HEAD._ **

**_ _ **

**\------**

In his cocoon, he wakes in the eye of a firestorm, with the piercing cry of a hunting raptor in his throat.

**oOoOoOo**

_Helicarrier Iliad_

Steve lays a hand on what’s left of the healing pod, trying to wrap his head around the security feeds he’s been shown. Tony, peaceful and comatose, the same as he’s been for months, until he smirks and bursts into bright, orange-gold flames. The agents rushing in with fire extinguishers, technicians in jumpsuits and doctors in white lab coats racing to save Tony from the fire.

The moment when Tony rises out of the destroyed pod like a phoenix from the ashes, eyes glowing solid gold and a disturbingly familiar emblem spread across his chest.

He removes his hand from the pod, and swipes it down his face. He might have the serum back to full strength, but he still feels like he’s pushing a century in age some days. “Are you sure there’s been no sign of Phoenix Force activity?”

“None at all, Commander.” The agent, whose name he doesn’t know, hands him a tablet brimming with information. “We scanned everywhere, using everything we could. Nothing whatsoever matches the signature of the Phoenix Force on that scale. There are plenty of minor signatures, but we’ve known about those since mutants started popping up again.”

Steve sighs, and takes the half dozen or so paces to the ragged hole blown in the wall, the edges of which are melted and seared. Distantly, he can see daylight on the other end of the tunnel. He shakes his head, thinking that only Tony could manage this much destruction just after a months-long coma. He turns his attention to the tablet, swiping through the pages of information already collated. “How many bulkheads does this go through?”

“I… I don’t know, Commander. We’re still compiling a damage report. The med lab is in the center of the widest level, though, for security reasons. So… approximately half the bulkheads on this floor?”

“Repair the most critical sections first,” he says, and uses his finger and thumb to zoom into a still shot from the security feeds: Tony, closed eyes brighter than they were a minute prior, and a faintly visible phoenix anima glowing around him. “And send the best we have after Tony. If he’s become a Phoenix host, we need to retrieve him quickly and quietly before we have a riot situation on our hands. The world doesn’t need a reminder — or god forbid a repeat — of the Phoenix Five.”

“Right away, Commander.”

The agent hurries away, and Steve flips through the screenshots on the tablet again, forehead furrowed in thought. In hindsight, he should have expected something like this to happen. Tony’s nothing if not resourceful, even when he has no resources to draw from. _Especially_ with no resources to draw from, because that’s when his nigh-supernatural luck always comes into play.

Well, he wanted Tony Stark awake to see what he was doing. The Phoenix Force is a complication, but maybe he can turn it into a boon. If he can secure Tony’s loyalty, which shouldn’t be that difficult or time-consuming, Steve’s plans come to fruition much quicker and with more chance of success than his previous assessments calculated.

And if the Phoenix Force corrupts Tony, the same way it’s done to every other one of its hosts, so much the better.

**oOoOoOo**

_Blue Area of the Moon_

Tony comes to with an awareness that’s as sudden as it is disconcerting. He is instantly awake and aware, which is more than a little unsettling when he finishes processing his surroundings and realizes he’s sprawled in the dust at the base of the Watcher’s Citadel with no memory of how he got there or _why the fuck he’s not wearing a spacesuit when he can’t survive off the planet without one._

Panic sets in fast and hard, and he’s on his feet in a heartbeat, wildly looking around for a ship, an alien, hell, even a red-suited witch, to explain his current situation. Useless instinct has him holding his breath in a desperate attempt to not suffocate which he knows is utterly ridiculous because he doesn’t know how long he’s been up here unconscious, but however long it was, he had to have been breathing the whole time.

Logic isn’t playing in this ballgame, though; it’s ceded the field to fear and lizard instinct, both of which are screaming warnings of his imminent death at him. He races for the door of the Citadel, praying like he’s never prayed before that Uatu is in the mood for visitors and knowing that he’ll never make it before his lungs force him to inhale, whether he likes it or not.

He’s almost to the steps leading to the massive entrance, eyes blurred and greying, light-headed and dizzy with the onset of hypoxia, when he _has_ to breathe. He closes his eyes as he gasps in a good, solid lungful of the Moon’s deadly atmosphere, and finds that interestingly (but not really surprisingly), his last thought is to wish Steve was here with him.

It takes him three breaths to register that he’s not dead. He cautiously cracks open an eye, takes a couple of quick, experimental breaths, but if he’s not breathing nitrogen-oxygen, his body certainly doesn’t seem to understand he should be flopping like a fish on the beach, dying of suffocation.

“I…” he says, and trails off when his voice comes out like it normally does, which is _goddamn impossible in a thinner atmosphere, because sound waves don’t carry the same._ “...am going to stop trying to figure out what the fuck is going on, because I need my brain to figure out how the fuck I’m getting out of here.”

He turns completely around, slow and careful, scanning for … anything, anything at all, that can help him out of this predicament. Off in the distance, the ruined spires of the Blue City are just barely visible, and it’s an embarrassingly long time before he realizes exactly where he is. The Blue Area. Artificially created to mimic Earthlike conditions. He’s not dying of oxygen deprivation because _he’s breathing oxygen._

He’s almost obligated to knock his name down the list of geniuses to ninth or tenth place with stupidity like that.

He sits, perhaps a little more abruptly than he meant to, on the top step and swipes a hand slowly down his face. “God,” he says with utter and sincere feeling, props his chin in his hands, elbows on knees, and stares glumly out at the lunarscape. It occurs to him that after all this time, he should be used to waking up somewhere strange with no idea of what happened, because it’s such a regular occurrence in his life, he should start planning his schedule around it. _Sorry, Pep. Can’t attend that conference. I’m expecting some sort of incapacitation and memory loss around that time._

“Okay,” he says, rubs his face briskly and straightens his back. “This is not your first amnesia rodeo, Stark. Focus. Last thing I remember is…” He wracks his memory, closing his eyes and combing through his mind to summon the images, the emotions, buried in the backup partition of his mind.

Miles. Miles Morales. Standing, terrified but defiant of Ulysses’ visions, on the steps of the Capitol. Steve facing him, with the kind of perfect, patient faith only Captain America can display, confident Ulysses is wrong.

Carol. Lost-her-fucking-mind Carol coming for Miles to arrest him for what he _might_ do, like the world turned into _Minority Report_ without warning. And him at the end of his rope, coming to stop her. A fight, both of them furious and pulling no punches, then Carol hits him harder than she probably intended, and then _nothing_.

But that can’t be all of it. A fist fight with Carol can’t explain any of this. He’s been on some weird mind-trippy drugs before, but he’s pretty sure that even Carol can’t punch him to the moon.

Time to go sideways and track down associated memories, earlier ones, that might give him some clue. He sorts through a trial, Clint’s. Right. Bruce killed himself with Clint’s hands, goddamn them both. Trying to reason with Carol, trying to make her understand what a fucking self-fulfilling prophecy is. Not helpful in the least.

Go another direction. He’s not in red-and-gold in the fist fight. He’s in the War Machine armor. Why the hell is he in the War Machine armor?

He frowns, eyebrows twitching, as the memory tries to slip away from him, stinging him with pain like a static shock in warning that maybe he really doesn’t want to know what it contains. He chases after it, determined to catch it before it becomes a ghost file, because he has a feeling it has the answers he needs.

It doesn’t.

It’s rage and pain. Grief and soul-numbing despair. It’s standing in the rain beside a fresh-dug grave. It’s landing rough and hard outside the medical facility because he’s crying too hard, shaking with fury too hard, to see straight.

It’s staring down at Rhodey’s body, trying to process the loss of his best friend. His brother.

It’s listening to Carol try to justify it, try to tell him that Rhodey would consider it a worthy sacrifice, because they stopped the bad guy.

It’s feeling it all again like it’s the first time, fresh and new and bleeding-edge sharp.

It hits him like a semi thrown by a pissed-off Hulk, socks him in the gut so hard it bends him double, takes the breath out of his chest, grabs him by the throat and the heart and _squeezes_ until he’s yelling something wordless and enraged, because it’s either that, or the pressure pounding behind his eyeballs explodes through his skull.

Warmth and awareness wash through him, something waking up in alarmed response to his surging, uncontrolled emotions. He’s only peripherally aware of it, but it builds in size and presence, weaving through his rage and smoothing it out, until it’s righteous wrath flaring bright and hot, until he’s burning with the unbearable pressure, until his skin can’t contain any more.

Blue-white flames wash over him, explode out from him, and he rises into the sky like he’s in his armor, howling as the madness boils away, distills down fine and pure, decants into a container in a corner of his mind, and fades into stillness.

He hits the ground on his hands and knees as the flames fade away, head low and panting hard. He’s drained, exhausted, want to do nothing more than curl into a ball and go to sleep for a week, then sleep for a week more over the loss of Rhodey. But he doesn’t have the time, or the opportunity, or the privilege, to do any of that.

Because his skin is steaming slightly in the air, smoke rising from his fingertips in lazy, thin swirls, and over the black material of the flight suit he woke up in, right where his RT disk contours his chest, is a silver-blue Phoenix emblem spread bold and proud.

And he stares at it for a long time, touches it gingerly, traces the lines. Almost forgets Rhodey in the process of not wanting to recognize what he’s seeing. “Okay,” he says, disbelieving and incredulous. “What the _fuck_?”

**oOoOoOo**

_Steve’s Apartment_

Steve lets himself into his apartment and closes the door behind him after surreptitiously checking to ensure he wasn’t followed by either SHIELD or a loyalist devoted to Herr Schmidt. He’ll never be as perceptive as some of his friends, but he’s no amateur at spotting a tail. Everything is free and clear, but he still takes the precautions of closing his blinds and sweeping for listening devices, technological, magical and otherwise, before he opens the door to the small utility room where he keeps his holo-com and body paint.

He hates doing this ritual Schmidt insists he perform, not only because it’s so ridiculously ostentatious and self-aggrandizing for the Red Skull, the body paint also takes forever to scrape off his skin unless his communique with Schmidt takes less than five minutes.

He suspects Schmidt knows this, because these conversations rarely last less than five minutes.

He strips the jacket of his uniform, sheds the undershirt he’s taken to wearing inside it, and dips his fingers in the paint to quickly outline the head and tentacles of the hydra. It offends him on more than just a personal level. From an artistic standpoint, as a student and fan of the classics, he knows damned well it’s a kraken, not a hydra, the organization uses to identify itself.

It’s a minor thing in the grand scheme, an insignificant detail that nevertheless does nothing but further convince Steve that Schmidt is completely unfit to lead a horse to a trough, let alone an organization of HYDRA’s scope into the bright and bold future.

Steve, on the other hand…

Best not to think about it that now, however. He sighs, steels himself, and kneels as he palms the activation on the holo-com, and is in Schmidt's preferred position when the glow lights up overhead.

“Commander Rogers.” Schmidt always sounds the same, pleased and smug, every time his voice oozes across the channel. “How unexpected. You're outside your standard communication schedule.  Do you have something to report?”

“I do.” He straightens from his obedient crouch and comes to a parade rest, hands tucked together behind his back. He's been debating how much he should relay, and how much to keep to himself for hours now, trying to figure out his best tactical move. Time's run out, and he has to make a decision. “Tony Stark has woken up.”

Something flickers across Schmidt's face, there and gone so rapidly Steve questions if it was there to begin with. But one does not survive decades in service to Hydra without developing a healthy sense of paranoia. He's reluctant to tell Schmidt everything, but he can't assume Schmidt doesn't have spies embedded in SHIELD to watchdog his loyalty.

“He seems to have developed some sort of Phoenix Force ability,” Steve continues, bland and professional, keeps himself from so much as letting an eyelash twitch when shock and a hint of fear flashes through Schmidt's eyes. “He burned his way through half of the Helicarrier and disappeared. I'm looking into the circumstances, and have prioritized resources in order to locate and retrieve Stark as quickly and quietly as possible. Once he's found—”

“No,” Schmidt says abruptly, and Steve snaps his mouth shut in surprise. “Stark is not a high priority target at the moment. The Phoenix is a volatile element, Commander. Attacking it, or being perceived to attack it, has grave potential to unravel everything we have worked towards these last few decades. Return your resources to their normal operations and do nothing to threaten the success of our ultimate mission.”

Behind his back, his fingers curl into fists. “If the Phoenix can be shown the way...” he begins, and closes his mouth again as Schmidt waves him silent.

“Monitor the situation and keep me informed. Better opportunities will come to recruit Mr. Stark to the cause, Commander.” Schmidt gives a smirk that manages to be slimy and suggestive, an impressive feat with Schmidt's bone structure. “Wait for one. That is an order, not a suggestion. Hail Hydra.”

“Hail Hydra,” Steve replies, and Schmidt's image fades out as the holo-com returns to standby mode. He remains standing in place for a long time, staring thoughtfully into space, turning the entire exchange over in his head, examining every aspect of it that he can think to examine.

No matter which way he pulls at it, he can conclude one thing for sure: Schmidt is afraid of the Phoenix. He doesn't know why, though he can make a few educated guesses, but the why doesn't really matter. What matters is that he needs to find and recruit Tony as soon as possible. He's spent years cultivating the man's loyalty and love. Maybe it's finally time to capitalize on that.

And if Schmidt has spies in SHIELD, that's fine too. He has other resources he can call upon to monitor for Tony’s location. He needs to check in with Selvig anyway, so the timing is perfect. Selvig should be more than capable of tracking Phoenix-level energy spikes.

But first, he thinks with a grimace as he scratches a sudden itch on his chest and paint catches in his nails, he needs to get a shower and scrub this stuff off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After the events of the first Civil War event, a grief-mad Scarlet Witch wishes for there to be "no more mutants" and there aren't, until Hope Summers, the Mutant Messiah, is born. In Avengers vs. X-Men, the Phoenix Force returns to Earth, presumably for Hope. Scott Summers and the mutants on Genosha, what few are left, are hoping it's come back to spark mutant births anew. The Avengers, led by Tony and Steve, aren't so sure, because one of the things a Phoenix is really good at is fucking shit up on a planetary scale. Tony builds a suit to take the Phoenix down, but accidentally splits it into five pieces, which empower Scott Summers, Emma Frost, Illyana and Piotr Rasputin, and Namor, who become tyrants and despots. They're defeated, eventually. Wanda and Hope together wish for No More Phoenix, and the Phoenix Force disperses across the Earth, begins reawakening mutations in depowered mutants. 
> 
> In Civil War II, Captain Marvel starts pre-emptively fighting crime by listening to Ulysses, a newly-minted Inhuman with the ability to predict the future (at least, that's what it looks like at first blush). Tony objects, because we shouldn't arrest people for things they might do. Carol persists anyway, and the mission she undertakes with her Ultimates results in Rhodey's death and Jennifer Walters' being crippled and nearly killed. Tony keeps challenging Carol's certainty that Ulysses is seeing a definite future instead of what science tells him (Ulysses has the ability to crunch numbers and see _possible_ futures). This culminates in Bruce Banner being killed by Clint Barton, as Bruce had made Clint promise to kill him if he ever started turning into the Hulk again, and the stress of about a hundred people showing up on his front step with accusations and threats of incarceration kinda started triggering the Hulk. At the very end, with Carol definitely having lost her shit and Ulysses' visions growing even more preposterous, extreme, and frequent, Carol tries to arrest Miles Morales, who she believes is about to murder Captain America based on Ulysses' visions.
> 
> She and Tony brawl it out instead, because he's not letting her touch Miles at all. Carol punches Tony into a coma, and Hank McCoy later states, at the Helicarrier Iliad, where Steve had him moved to life support machines, that if not for Tony's self-experimentation to keep himself alive at various points, Carol would have killed him. 
> 
> Carol, it should be noted, is given pretty much a blank check by the President to keep her Ultimates going in the aftermath of these events.
> 
> So yeah. All of that leads to this fic. ISTFG, Marvel. ISTFG.


	2. Chapter 2

**oOoOoOo**

_ Blue Area of the Moon/Stark Tower _

It takes Tony three days of ransacking the burned-out husks of houses and spaceships in the Blue City to scavenge enough bits of tech to finish building his scanning device. He doesn’t want to say that he’s obsessed with figuring out his shiny new Phoenix-like abilities, but it’s been the only thought in his head since he found himself on the surface of the Moon with no memory of how he got there.

Picking through ancient Kree and Inhuman technology has never been his idea of a fun vacation, but he grits his teeth and forces himself to do it out of sheer necessity. He’s been riding the edge of panic for too long, only holding together by focusing on the notion that, once he figures out just what the fuck happened to him, he can figure out how to fix it. 

Preferably before he goes all third-person pronouns and Overlord of the Earth douchery.  He refuses to descend to the same level as fucking  _ Namor _ . 

It takes a full hour for the cobbled-together device to process his blood samples, skin cells, saliva samples, hair samples, hell, every bodily fluid and scrap of DNA he could scrape off his person. He paces the entire time, impatient and all but choking on his barely-controlled terror that he’s about to revisit his Superior Iron Man days and become the absolute asshole he never wants to be again. 

When the readings are finally ready, he whirls with a knee-weakening sense of relief and forces his brain to connect with the alien interface, pulls every byte of data from the machine and into his own lightning-fast thought processes, sorting and collating and comparing and cross-referencing at about a thousand times the speed of the prehistoric, ugly hunk of junk he slapped together. 

The conclusions he reaches based on that analysis of the data, it’s safe to say, are  _ not  _ what he expected. 

“Bullshit,” he blurts, eyes snapping open, wide and shocked. He stares at the machine for a long moment, then shakes his head. “No, bullshit. There’s no possible way that could have happened.”

The third time he runs it, the sixth time, the fifteenth time, all return with the same results. 

“It’s confirmation bias,” he mutters to himself and returns to his frantic pacing. “Once I had it in my head, of course I’d get the same thing again and again.” He stops abruptly, presses the fingertips of both shaking hands to the bridge of his nose, and exhales slowly. 

There’s only one solution to his problem now. He needs to break the stalemate he has with his own incredulity. He either needs to accept the results from eons-old Kree garbage, or he needs to disprove these frankly fucking impossible results with his own trusted, reliable equipment. 

“Shit. Shit, shit,  _ shit _ .”

There’s nothing for it. He’s going to have to go home. 

\------

Once he decides to do something, hell and high water combined don’t have a chance of stopping him. Every instinct, now that he’s set his mind on a short-term goal, is screaming at him to blast off and head for Earth, but he refrains from heading into space immediately. 

He is, thankfully, not cursed with an under-abundance of basic common sense, so he does it the smart way. He knows, maybe better than most people who haven’t hosted the Phoenix, that this entity bestows incredible power and abilities on its chosen hosts, but there are enough observable differences in his particular manifestation compared to Jean Grey, Rachel Grey, or the Phoenix Five, that he isn’t just going to assume it will protect him from vacuum exposure or suffocation in space without testing its limits. 

He starts small, making his way to the edge of the Blue Area, where the natural atmosphere of the Moon butts up against the artificial barrier keeping Earth-normal gravity and air locked to the Luther Crater. His tests are incremental, beginning with stepping outside the barrier for a few seconds before darting back in with his heart hammering in his throat. 

His confidence grows as the tests remain successful, and he’s decidedly not thinking about what he’s breathing, or how the flames around him are transmuting essential nothingness into life-sustaining nitrox, but when he’s been hovering above the barrier, well into the highest layer of the moon’s thin atmosphere, for over an hour without any symptoms of hypoxia, exposure or even  _ strain,  _ he knows he can’t put off his journey back to terra firma any longer. 

He’d long theorized that the Phoenix Force imparted a natural, instinctive control to its hosts over the various gifts it gave them, but he’s been a denizen of the skies for so long, he can’t tell if he’s got an edge because of his mastery of the Iron Man armors, or if the Phoenix is giving him a boost. He’s definitely  _ faster,  _ a fact he’s a little disgruntled to learn, by at least a factor of two. This is not how he had ever intended to fly this speed.

Beggars stranded on the goddamn moon probably can’t afford to be choosers, though, no matter how rich they are. 

Almost before he knows it, orange-gold flames are licking at his blue-white-silver halo, and trepidation turns to a ball of ice in the pit of his stomach when he realizes he’s entering the Earth’s atmosphere, and this is one thing he couldn’t test ahead of time. He knows that theoretically he should be just fine, but Earth’s atmosphere is an entirely different beast than her child, the Moon’s, so the only thing he can do is let gravity take him, let himself fall, let the fires burn hot and bright, and pray that whatever deity is in charge of his nigh-supernatural luck isn’t feeling particularly cranky right now. 

Flying this high above the earth, though… that never gets old. No matter how many times he does it, no matter what state of mind or physical condition he’s in, he always manages to find a moment of quiet, a moment of peace and reflection, where he can just admire the gorgeousness of his home planet as he soars high above the shackles of her gravity. He skims through the troposphere, following the familiar lines of continents until he’s back over North America, then crunches the numbers and processes his best angle to hit Manhattan pretty much square above Stark Tower. 

The fewer people that see him, the better, in his opinion. 

He’s probably ten thousand feet up when an unholy cacophony of  _ sound  _ slams into his head, and he yells reflexively, grabbing at his head and immediately losing control over his flight path. The flames flicker around him, banking down to near invisibility, snuffing out completely in places, but he has only a sliver of attention for that, because  _ his goddamn head is trying to explode.  _

Twenty five million people scream inside his skull, chattering at ear-splitting volumes in overlapping layers of conversation too muddled and numerous to have a chance of understanding. If anyone ever asks, he’s going to claim that the tears in his eyes are from the wind tearing at his ducts, not from the psychosis-inducing  _ agony  _ throbbing through his head. 

He hits the enormous glass window that serves as a wall for the tower’s penthouse living room, and has a few precious nanoseconds to appreciate that his sense of direction and spacial awareness hasn’t seem to suffered, because at least he’s breaking his own buildings with his ass, not something he’s going to have to pay someone else a fortune in apology for. 

He spirals through the den, overturning couches and armchairs and tables and glassware as he spins. Catches sight of the marble bar approaching at high velocity and definitely unsafe speeds.  _ This is gonna suck,  _ he thinks glumly a second before he crashes into it and the world goes dark and quiet and fuzzy for awhile. 

\-----

He isn't out long, at least not according to his internal clock, but he wakes up feeling like the Hulk  _ and  _ Abomination used his skull as a hackey sack in a mosh pit of pissed off, gamma-powered football players. He sits up carefully, gingerly feeling the back of his head and grimacing when his fingers come away tacky with cooling blood. “Ow,” he groans softly, closes his eyes and gently rests his head against the marble behind him. He can already feel Extremis, or the Phoenix -- and he’s definitely loopy with a concussion at the very least, because he wants to giggle at the portmanteau that pops into his head: Phoenixtremis -- or both busily knitting together his various aches and injuries, of which there are a multitude.

He’s just going to sit here for awhile until they’re done unfucking his skeletal system. 

When he feels like he can move again, he hauls himself up, making a face at the dingy, dirty, torn remnants of his flight suit that has mysteriously reappeared now that the Phoenix body suit has just as mysteriously disappeared. He hangs onto furniture, walls and secured fixtures as he makes his way across the room towards the elevator in the back, still a bit too unsteady on his feet to trust in his own balance. 

His shower is a sin straight out of the  _ Divine Comedy,  _ and he may end up in the second circle of hell for it, but the water pounding down with searing temperatures and massage-setting function is too orgasmic after three days of lunar dust and fuck-knows-how-long of pod-grime coating his body. 

He isn’t sure painkillers will even work on his once-again altered systems, but before he leaves the bathroom with damp hair, trimmed beard, bare feet and his oldest jeans and favorite t-shirt, he shakes four naproxen tabs into his palm that have been rated for Hulk-sized headaches. He swallows them with a mouthful of water from the tap, which is a bad idea in retrospect, because it wakes up his stomach, and Jesus fucking Christ, it is  _ ravenous.  _

Three cans of soup and the best fucking four cups of coffee he’s ever had in his life later, he’s finally feeling human enough, at home enough, comfortable enough, to return his attention to his pressing, immediate problems. He takes a fifth cup of coffee with him, letting his mind reconnect with the Tower’s electronic systems, his computer networks and data signals, and feels as though an unbearable weight just slid off his shoulders. 

Everything’s going to be fine now, he tells himself, sipping his coffee and padding down in his bare feet to his laboratory on one of the lower levels. He’ll get proper readings from his equipment, they’ll tell him exactly what’s going on, and he’ll figure out a way to get himself out of this post-haste. 

\--------

“Bullshit!”

Six iterations of increasingly detailed tests have done nothing but confirm the results he ran from his data collection on the surface of the Moon, and Tony stares at the screen in stubborn disbelief. 

There is no pure Phoenix signature clustered anywhere in his body. 

It's  _ everywhere _ in his body. 

He spins abruptly, flicking his hand at a side screen to clear it of its damning, unwelcome data and summons from the depths of his cloud servers the data files he tucked away of all the scans he collected from the Phoenix Five. 

Side by side with his own in-depth full body scan, he can't deny the evidence before his eyes any longer. The Phoenix Five were almost irradiated by the Phoenix Force's energy signature, an overlay template stitched to their own DNA in ways he still cannot begin to fathom, but a separate, provably separate, entity distinct in its readings.

Tony's scans, on the other hand, show no such distinction. No such separation. No such provable difference in entities.

The Phoenix hosts of record were suffused with its energy.

Tony is  _ made of it. _

He sits in dumbfounded silence, one hand clutching his jaw in mid-mopping motion, staring at the screen as if the longer he eyes it, the better his chances of finding it displaying something completely different.

“Okay,” he says, dropping  a his hand away from his face and leaning back in his chair. “Okay. Think it through.”

His brain doesn't want to tackle the problem. It's too busy trying to assimilate the information it's just been forced to admit is indisputable. He grits his teeth and forces it to do it anyway. 

The only working theory he feels has any credibility is  _ Extremis did it. _

If the nanotech comprising his brain's repair centers read the Phoenix like a virus or a bacterial infection, it would have triggered the appropriate immune response and started fighting off the invading entity. If the Phoenix fought back, Extremis would have escalated, until the cycle resulted in all-out microscopic warfare that could have only one victor. 

He scrubs his face tiredly, because that's where the theory breaks down from rational, logical progression into some wacky, fringe science shit. If anything, Extremis should have eradicated the Phoenix, or Phoenix eradicated it. He doesn't understand  _ at all  _ how or why it would do  _ this. _

Unless…

He stops, waits for the thought to finish maturing, and then blinks in chagrin when it blooms, ripe and complete.

Unless the Phoenix energy had been in him long enough that Extremis recognized it as both invader  _ and  _ Tony, and repaired the damage from its attempted takeover without differentiating between them. If it didn't overwrite one with the other, but merged them together on a mitochondrial level. 

“Bullshit,” he whispers, but every drop of his conviction has evaporated. 

He needs more data. He needs scans of himself while he lay comatose in the vaguely-recalled healing pod. He needs to talk to whatever medical professionals oversaw his treatment and convalescence for however long he was there. 

He needs to figure out where he'd been kept, and then go back there to get his data.

“Shit,” he says on a weary exhale. “Shit, shit,  _ shit.” _

**oOoOoOo**

_ Hydra Safehouse _

Three days with no word from Selvig has left Steve in a distinctly cranky mood, and if not for the fact that he’s been playing the role of patient and understanding Captain America so dutifully, he’s fairly sure he’d have pitched at least one of his aides off the side of the Helicarrier in flight by now. Even then, it’s down to the wire, nearly a photo finish, when the encrypted message comes directly to his personal secured tablet just as he’s contemplating arranging for Maria Hill’s assassination. 

Selvig’s found Tony.

It’s still hours before he can extricate himself from his duties as the Commander of SHIELD, and he knows his underlings have noted his patience wearing thin, but whether through faithful service or just plain old self-preservation, not one of them so much as suggests with their tones of voice that he’s being unreasonable.

As he departs the Helicarrier in his personal quinjet, he mentally revises his estimated tally of the Helicarrier crew and staff he intends to keep when his takeover of Hydra is complete. 

There’s an excitement stirring in his gut, a giddy sense of anticipation, as he nears the safehouse where he’s been keeping Selvig, and the familiar sense of it nags at him until he’s landing the quinjet on the protected, hidden tarmac near the facility. It strikes him suddenly, as he’s preparing to disembark from the vehicle, and he pauses with a sense of wonder as he realizes why it’s so familiar. 

This is how he felt, all those long years ago, when Hydra took his mother and he in. When he found a sense of belonging, a community to which he belonged despite his many illnesses and physical ailments. This is  _ purpose,  _ renewed, refreshed, rejuvenated. 

This is who and what he is, reaffirmed once more. 

He can’t keep himself from smiling broadly, all but reeling in the delight coursing through him. He’s a seven-year-old kid again, attending his first meeting with his mother. He’s eleven, carefully carrying a tea tray to his mother and her friends as they chatter away and sew a Hydra banner with the radio playing soft jazz in the background. He’s twenty-four and breathing hard and fast as the Rebirth chamber closes around him. 

God, he’s  _ missed  _ feeling this buoyant. 

But he’s not so buoyant that he abandons all of his carefully-laid and protected procedures and tactics in the rush of the moment. By the third time he’s broadly circled the facility’s secret entrance, he is a hundred percent sure he has not been followed. Only then does he brush the camouflage from the palm print and retinal scanner, and unseal the entrance to enter the safehouse. 

With no further immediate need for normalcy, he lets his stride lengthen, eat up the distance from door to elevator until he’s all but running to it, slapping his hand on the call button, impatiently waiting while it descends into the lower, inhabited layers. 

Selvig is where he should be when Steve finally reaches the lab, sitting in front of his bank of computer screens, peering up at them and muttering to himself about things Steve doesn’t understand and, frankly, has no desire to learn about. 

_ Another reason I need Tony,  _ he thinks.  _ He can understand what Selvig is doing. I won’t have to ever worry about his loyalty with Tony looking over his shoulder.  _

It occurs to him, brief and fleeting, that he might have to worry about  _ Tony’s  _ loyalty, but he dismisses that errant thought as rapidly as it came. 

“What have you found?” he says when he’s close enough that he doesn’t have to shout. “Where has Tony been hiding and where is he now?”

Selvig spares him a glance, pushing his glasses further up on the bridge of his nose, then turns back to his computers. “The Phoenix energy registered first in the ionosphere,” he says, and Steve has to take a second to remember which layer of the Earth’s atmosphere that is. Selvig taps a few keys and brings up a display of its trajectory. “It originated from the Luther Crater of the Moon,” he continues, stabbing a finger at the spot and tracing the arcing line down into the spherical representation of the Earth. “A place colloquially known as the Blue Area. And it disappeared just above Manhattan, but extrapolating its trajectory and accounting for its host, I estimated its destination to be…” Another few taps, and the satellite view zooms in with dizzying speed to resolve into a Manhattan street map. “Stark Tower,” Selvig says with satisfaction, tapping the screen again.

“Of course,” Steve breathes, leans into the screen as if he can see into the pixelated windows straight through the computer, and smiles widely. Triumph is so close he can almost taste it. “Good job, Dr. Selvig,” he says, and turns to start striding back towards the quinjet. “I won’t forget your diligence in this matter.”

Selvig shoots him a toothy grin, turns in his chair, and salutes Steve the way only Schmidt is supposed to be honored. “Hail Hydra,” he says, then blinks when the computer behind him beeps, and turns around again. 

Steve tilts his head, instantly alert. “What is it?”

Selvig peers up again, adjusts his glasses. “The Phoenix energy has reappeared,” he says over the clatter of keys, and the screen tabs through a number of map-based and satellite imaging programs until Selvig selects one. “It’s moving.”

Steve’s shoulders tighten, and his hands fist at his sides. If anyone gets to Tony before he does… “Where is it going?”

Selvig is silent for a few moments, long enough that Steve’s edginess is beginning to return, but then he chuckles darkly. “It was in the Blue Area of the Moon,” he says with another chuckle, “because that’s where it died. Based on its speed and trajectory now? I’d say it’s returning to where it was born again.” He reaches behind him and points to a spot on the map, a fair distance from where a red dot blinks and inches along. 

Helicarrier  _ Iliad _ ’s current location _.  _

Steve understands instantly, and the elation returns. “I’ll be in touch,” he says shortly, and spins on his heel to stride towards the door again. “Monitor Tony’s progress and inform me if there’s any change at all in his destination.”

“Of course, Commander,” Selvig murmurs, but Steve’s already stopped paying attention. All of his focus and energy is now directed towards getting back to the Helicarrier before Tony arrives. 

He needs to be there when his errant friend comes home. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for narcissistic behaviour and gaslighting attempts.

**oOoOoOo**

_Stark Tower_

He debates taking a suit back to the Helicarrier, because he’s pretty sure that arriving there with his body aflame the same way the security footage showed he left is just going to attract all sorts of attention he doesn’t want, but two things make him decide against it. The first is that he’s pretty sure they already know what he’s become, because he left in a streak of orange-yellow-gold fire that apparently burned through multiple bulkheads and the outer hull of the Helicarrier.  Coming back in a suit isn’t going to change the fact that they already know about him.

The second is that, despite the first logical points against taking a suit, he tries to put one on anyway, and finds he’s developed some sort of claustrophobia in the last few lost months, and the suit closing around him, which once felt like home, now just feels like a prison from which he can’t escape.

That disturbs him more than anything else.

He stands for a long time in front of the armor, running his palm across shiny gold and gleaming red, trying to swallow past the lump of emotion solidified in his throat. “I am Iron Man,” he says softly, and it still rings true, because it always will as far as he’s concerned, but it doesn’t feel as solid as it used to.

He sighs and regretfully leaves the armor behind, heading up to the flight deck and stopping in the penthouse along the way to pick up a jacket. At least this Phoenix bullshit hasn’t taken flying away from him, he thinks, albeit a little bitterly, as he lets himself float into the sky, rolling his eyes at the rapid formation of the Phoenix suit around him the moment his feet leave the ground.

“Maybe I could make the magical bodysuit into Iron Man armor,” he muses aloud as he orients himself, shields his eyes, and hopes like all hell the naproxen is still working to stave off any recurring headache-inducing events that might happen to him along the way.

It would be his luck to catch surprise telepathy from the Phoenix infection. He wonders if he should visit Jean Grey’s grave and thank her in all four-letter words for that gift.

\------

_Helicarrier Iliad_

The footage he found when reconstructing his first day awake was grainy and shaky in places, and he isn’t sure he has the right Helicarrier until he crests the mountain range along which it patrols and sees the damage done to the side. It’s clear repair work has been started, but he can’t have been mobile for any length of time, because the repairs are just as clearly still in the very early stages.

There are tools scattered about just inside the melted hole in the outer hull, but when Tony floats in and peers around, he can’t see a single crewmember or engineer scurrying anywhere. He frowns a little in confusion, a little in concern. That’s not normal, he knows. He used to be the Director of SHIELD, after all. One thing all Directors have made a priority, regardless of political leanings or agendas, was that any damage to a Helicarrier got round the clock repairwork done, overtime be damned, because as floating, armed-to-the-teeth fortresses, they were too valuable to be out of commission or weakened any longer than they absolutely had to be.

There should be people here. A lot of people.

Instead, he slips in with no one flesh-and-blood present to note his entry.

His disquiet only grows as he walks through a silent and still series of corridors. Even without all the mission-critical repairwork that needs to be done, these sections should be bustling with agents and crew, moving to and from hangar decks, laboratories, medical facilities, communications stations. But it’s just him and his shadow and the prickling sensation of being watched that lifts all the hair off the back of his neck.

He reaches out instinctively, connecting to the network of the Helicarrier and partitioning part of his attention to hacking into the most heavily encrypted parts of the system.  It would be a cakewalk if he still had his Director or even his consultant credentials, but Norman Osborn’s disastrous stint as Director after Tony’s unceremonious ousting resulted in a complete overhaul with fresh operating systems and brand new credentials.

Good thing he’s got that whole Extremis electronic communion thing working for him. If not for that, he’d be totally screwed.

He mentally navigates the labyrinthine circuits and pathways of the system as he carefully picks his way through the half-removed debris and scattered tools and equipment left behind by the absentee workers. All this needs to be the perfect setting for a horror movie is a big-chested blonde and some sparking, flickering lighting.

As if summoned by the very thought of “big-chested blonde”, Tony rounds a corner and there’s Steve, standing in the hallway, dark blue and silver chevrons instead of his stars and stripes, with a broad, happy smile and an outstretched hand. “Tony,” he says, warmth and camaraderie and other things Tony’s too busy trying to remember how fast a human heart is supposed to beat to decipher. “I’m glad you came back. I was worried about you.”

Tony puts a hand on the wall, leaning heavily on it as he clutches his chest and reins in his hyperventilation before his head starts swimming. “Hey Cap,” he says, breathless and voice twitching with the kind of laughter that comes in the sagging relief of not being killed after a really good scare. “Been taking lessons on how to scare the bejesus out of old friends from Widow while I’ve been unconscious? Cos damn, you’re pretty good at it.”

Steve laughs, and it's a sound so familiar and comforting, Tony feels warmth blossom in his chest, spreading through his whole body and draining a kind of tension he didn't even realize he's been carrying. “I don't think I'll ever be as good at sneaking around as Natasha,” Steve says with a rueful grin. “I'm sorry if I scared you. Wasn't my intention. I just wasn't sure where your head was, given everything, and I was trying to be unobtrusive, give you a chance to see me first.”

It sounds like Steve, the arm that slings companionably over his shoulders as they fall into step together certainly feels like Steve’s, but Tony can't help but feel like something is just a little bit off. Unease roils low in his gut, a faint burn of discomfort that sits like a cold stone quietly in the background, light enough that it isn't demanding his attention, heavy enough that he can't ignore it.

Steve turns those eyes on him, sparkling and happy, and usually that's been enough to make him melt a little on the inside, but all it does now is ramp up the anxious dread, send it thrumming through his nerves and into his bones.

The color is wrong. Still blue, still beautiful, but instead of calming him like it normally does, the hue makes him tense. It nags at him, plucking at something in his somewhat hazy recollections of his return to consciousness.

Have they always been that particular shade? He frowns a little, trying to force the tip-of-his-tongue sensation to manifest into something he can grasp, track, recall.

Nothing comes, so he shoves it aside for the moment, bumping it onto its own thought track to percolate as it will. He shoves down his disquiet and unease too, because as he told himself on the Moon, this is not his first amnesia rodeo, and he's bound to have some dissonant feelings and impulses until his brain finishes unscrambling itself.

He swings his arm up and hooks his hand around Steve's shoulder, beams back at him and says, “Catch me up on what happened while I was taking a long winter's nap.”

**\------**

Steve knows he's going to have to move very carefully with Tony, because Tony might not always see things that should be obvious, but he has a distinctly uncanny ability to make massive leaps of logic from small, disconnected, inconsequential things to comprehension and realization when it's exactly the least advantageous for the other side he does so.

He can’t afford to lose Tony. Not if he wants to accelerate his planned coup for the Red Skull. He’s already laid a lot of the fundamental groundwork over the years, but a single misstep now could cost him everything.

That’s simply something he can’t let happen. Especially not after, when he inquires in friendly curiosity what made Tony come back to the Helicarrier, Tony tells him the nearly unbelievable story of his cellular systems having been combined and rewritten with Phoenix energy incorporated.

He’s silent as he watches Tony pace around the laboratory where Steve had him moved after that Capitol business all those months ago. He kinda hates to admit it, but there’s something fluid, focused and attractive about the absolute attention Tony pays each piece in the lab, from the destroyed pod with its petal-curled, jagged-edged, bowed-out door panels, to the filing cabinet by the work table that contains only extra office supplies.

“You seem agitated, Tony,” he says, tone casual but words oh-so-carefully chosen to serve as his opening salvo. “Is there anything I can help with?”

Tony grimaces and puts a hand on the back of his neck. “I'm fine,” he says, clearly lying through his teeth, which Steve finds irks him a little more than it used to. Interesting. But before he can call Tony on the lie, Tony relents. “Okay, I'm clearly not fine. I just don't know how to explain it.”

Steve sits on the edge of the workbench behind him, folds his arms in the manner he knows Tony always interprets as his Cap Is Giving His Full Attention To Your Problems stance. “Why don’t you start at the beginning,” he suggests with a quirk of his mouth, “and go from there.”

And the tale Tony weaves, waking up on the Moon with blue fire surrounding him, getting unbelievable data scans from a device he built from scavenged alien technology, deciding to return to refute his results and discovering that his results can’t be refuted… Frankly, if anyone else but Tony Stark told him this story, he’d laugh and invite them to pull the other one.

“Scary thing is,” Tony says as he winds down to sleuthing his way through vague reports and grainy surveillance footage to figure out where he’d first woken up, blowing steam from the rim of the cup of coffee an unobtrusive agent handed him two minutes ago, “I think the Phoenix is going to be a permanent feature of the Tony Stark experience from here on out.”

That, more than anything else, has Steve’s full and undivided attention, but he restrains himself from showing any outward sign of anything but curious concern. “What makes you say that?”

“The scans,” Tony replies and sighs. He gulps coffee, and Steve waits impatiently for him to finish drinking. “I think whatever bit of the Phoenix picked me to hibernate in was there long enough, maybe even since the moment I broke the damn thing apart, it became part of me.”

Steve tilts his head. “What are you saying?”

“I’m not a host sharing my body with the Phoenix.” Tony hesitates, and his expression goes troubled and maybe a little trepidatious before he sighs and adds, “I think my body _is_ the Phoenix.”

It takes Steve a few moments to process that, but when he does, the implications slam into him like a jolt of pure adrenaline. He jolts off the desk, starting and blinking in genuine surprise. “What?”

Tony launches into a far more technical explanation about his Extremis nanotech and immune system responses than Steve is prepared or interested to follow all that closely, and he’s only half paying attention to the details as his mind whirls through all the new pathways and doors he can see opening in his mind’s eye. An embodied cosmic force, one perhaps powerful enough to challenge Schmidt’s embodied cosmic force, if he can’t coax Kobik to spend more time with him than Schmidt.

But he snaps back into giving Tony his full attention when Tony says, “That’s why I’m here. I’m trying to understand why this happened, _how_ this happened, but my data set is incomplete. I need my medical records, reports and readings from my stay here while I was out of it in order to piece together a more complete picture.” He tosses Steve one of his boyish grins, impish and hopeful. “So what do you say, Cap? Help a guy out?”

He might otherwise have said no, because he’s learned the hard way that granting Tony access to any sort of classified files frequently leads to Tony gaining access to classified files he wasn’t strictly permitted to see, but Steve needs to lock Tony’s allegiance down as soon as possible.

“Of course,” he says without hesitation. “Anything you need, Tony. Anything at all.” He pauses for a brief moment, and decides to add a caveat that will hopefully limit Tony’s characteristic wandering through computer files. “I’m not sure how many we have remaining. Unfortunately, your departure damaged a lot of systems, including the databanks where most of the medical records are stored. We have offsite backups, of course, but it takes time to request those. I’ll pull up what I can and give you access to them immediately. Will that be enough to start?”

He knows the hook’s been set when Tony beams at him, his face lighting up with gratitude. “Yeah, Steve. That’d be great. I really appreciate this.”

Impulse makes him reach out and lay his hand over Tony’s, but it’s a smart move, he thinks, because Tony is just as touch-oriented as he is perpetually touch-starved, and he knows it has the desired effect when Tony’s eyes dilate, his face flushes, and he inhales, soft but fast.

“Let’s get you started then,” Steve says, tone just a few notes lower than normal and hand still resting on Tony’s trembling fingers. “I’ll be in the next room. An aide’s been waiting in there for me for the last ten minutes, and they only do that when it’s important.”

“Sounds good,” Tony says, faint and breathless, and turns a shaky smile up at Steve.

“I hope you’ll stay with me,” Steve adds, and squeezes Tony’s hand gently for good measure before letting it go. “At least until you’ve gotten some of your stability back. Spend some time with me. I’ve missed having you around, Shellhead.”

He grins and winks at Tony, whose jaw drops slightly and whose eyes go round and big in his head. “Think about it, Tony. World’s a better place when we’re side-by-side. You taught me that.”

And he leaves Tony in perfect silence to step into the next room and deal with whatever flunky can’t wash his hands without Steve’s direction today.

**\------**

Tony doesn’t move a muscle for a long, long moment after Steve moves into the adjacent room, very carefully keeping his facial expression and his breathing under control. He doesn’t know how he manages it, because the surprise of Steve’s hand enfolding his warm so quickly transmuted into cold, screaming horror when he’d caught a mental picture he knows damned well didn’t come from his head, and it’s making him want to flee this place as fast as he can.  

Because he certainly would never picture Steve sans uniform shirt, with a goddamn Hydra logo painted in black on his bare chest, kneeling in subservience to the fucking Red Skull.

He doesn't think about the best ways to manipulate himself into pledging to Hydra.

He doesn't think about all the ways his sparkly new portfolio can benefit Steve and his plans for a new, better world. 

He glances back at the open door, through which Steve’s broad shoulders are just barely visible, hesitating. Maybe Steve is right, and he doesn’t have the capability yet to deal with all the shit that’s happened to him. Maybe he needs someone he can trust at his back, someone who can spot the things he’s missing.

He sighs faintly and shakes his head, runs both hands through his hair restlessly. He knows that person has to be Steve, because it’s always been Steve. Even when they found themselves on opposite sides of an argument, he could never really doubt that Steve knew what he was doing, and was doing it according to his Boy Scout code of honor, for the right reasons.

He doesn’t think he can believe in that anymore.

That’s a truly terrifying thought.

He's lost at sea here, has been since the moment he woke up. Here, on the Moon, in the den of the Tower after he crash-landed back down to earth. For a moment, he’d let himself think that everything could just go on the same as it had before, that despite his changes, Steve was unchanged and together, maybe they’d figure out a solution to this weird twist in Tony’s life.

He knows now that Steve doesn’t want a solution, isn’t interested in so much as learning _if_ a solution exists. Steve’s biding his time, _buying_ time, trying to win Tony over to his side, a side Tony has to ruthlessly repress shuddering in horror to think about ever joining.

In the next second, he’s got himself all but convinced that he’s finally gone batshit crazy, because there’s no way Steve Rogers, _Captain Fucking America,_ could ever possibly be a deep cover Hydra agent.

Only one way to know for sure. The discomfort and anxiety are in full-throated screaming right now, but Tony's spent his life wearing one mask or another, and showing an unconcerned, non-reactive expression when he's internally howling in shock and disbelief is second nature to him by now.

So he takes a deep breath, steels himself, reaches down into the well of instinct so recently acquired and pulls up the telepathy he now knows with dead certainty is there, waiting to be called on.

It would be easier with touch, he knows that from his interactions with Charles Xavier, but not even the theoretical lure of the last cup of coffee on earth could make him walk into that room and find an excuse to put his hand on Steve now.

It's familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Though it uses the same metaphorical muscles as connecting to computer networks and electronic devices, it’s a completely different sensation to connect with a living mind, and for a bad moment, Tony doesn’t think he’ll be able to do it at all.

And then he’s in a memory that he knows is not his, looking down at his own deceptively peaceful face, comatose behind the protective shell of the healing pod, Steve’s gloves resting over the viewing window.

 _Like I told you before, I’m not the man you think I am … I know every thought_ **_he_ ** _ever had about you. He loved you… He loved you and he admired you. Even when you fought… He was weak… I’m not like that, though… I’m hoping --_ **_praying_ ** _… So please, I’m begging you… wake up now. Come try to stop me. But you won’t. Or you can’t._

A different voice, tired and lost and thin, calling from the bottom of a deep, dark hole in the ground, a whispered scream howling his name like it’s a plea for help.

**_I am going to destroy everything you ever built._ **

Tony jerks back into his own head with a sharp gasp, and freezes like a deer in headlights with every cell of his being yowling at him to _run, run now._

But he keeps himself still, resumes his hand motions over the screens where Steve left his medical files, using the vague awareness of where Steve is and the hazy reflection of the room’s door on the darkened viewscreen to judge his best opportunity. Bides his time and pretends everything’s normal.

In the reflection, Steve moves into the doorway for a moment, as if he’s peering in at Tony, and his shoulders go whipcord tight, but he keeps his head down until Steve turns back to his aide, until Tony can’t see any part of him anymore. Until he’s completely out of sight.

And that’s when he drops the act, flares into a bonfire, and bolts at top speed for the holes in the bulkheads through which he entered, and doesn’t even care all that much that he bowls over the workers who have now appeared to continue their crucial repairs.

He doesn’t slow down at all until he’s halfway back to Manhattan, and he only does that long enough to consider his options. He doesn't have many. He might not have _any._ But he knows he needs a second opinion. An unvarnished, expert witness who always sees the things no one else does.

Luckily, he knows just the guy.

**oOoOoOo**

_Clint Barton’s Apartment_

“Well,” Clint says, leaning against the frame of his balcony doors with his arms crossed across his chest. “This is a new look for you, Tony. Something you want to share with the class?”

Tony arches an eyebrow, and absolutely does not look down at the scarlet and silver and arc-reactor blue Phoenix emblem flaring across his chest. “I thought you were the observant type, Hawkeye. Do we need to talk about a new code name?”

“Tony, you're on fire. That's not the part I'm curious about, though I realise it speaks volumes about how fucked up my life is when a friend shows up outside my window on fire and I don't bat an eyelash.” He tilts his head, but doesn't budge.  “Mostly, I'm wondering what the hell you're doing _here.”_

Tony shrugs, tries not to feel so very exposed,  hanging in midair and burning brightly as he is. “Got room for one more in the Bird Squad?”

Clint eyes him, then smirks. He steps back a pace, pulling the balcony door wider. “Get in before someone has the brilliant idea to take potshots at the flaming turkey in the sky,” he says.

“Appreciate it,” Tony murmurs, and the flames die when his feet touch down on Clint's balcony. “But Flaming Turkey is my porn name. I was young and needed the money.” He shakes his sleeves out as the Phoenix armor fades into the jeans and jacket he put on earlier that morning. “Got anything to drink?”

“That's handy,” Clint remarks, tossing an appreciative glance over his shoulder as he goes to the fridge to fish out a couple of bottles of water. He tosses one to Tony, putting it unerringly into his hands. “Always wondered if that quick costume change gimmick was a feature of the phenomenal cosmic power schtick. Learn something new every day.”

Tony cracks the bottle top, smirks and drains half the bottle in a long gulp. “I didn't notice,” he replies, replacing the cap. “I usually have armor on or near me. Isn't that a thing everyone does in our line of work?”

He laughs when Clint just gives him a flat look and pings his bottle cap off Tony's forehead. “Seriously, Stark. Why are you here? We haven't spoken since the trial. And you weren't particularly friendly then.”

“In my defense, I was comatose not long after,” Tony retorts, and sits in what looks to be a comfortable arm chair. It's better than it looks.  “I need this chair, Barton,” he says, running his hands over the plush, overstuffed armrests. “Where'd you get it?”

“Thrift store. Restuffed and re-upholstered it myself. Unique one-of-a-kind Hawkeye original. You can have it for a million dollars. Why are you here?”

Tony leans forward, digs his wallet out of his back pocket, and thumbs open the billfold. “I have thirty-seven dollars cash,” he says after a quick tally. “And I'm here because Steve is a Hydra agent, and I figured out of everyone I know, you'd be the first one who might have noticed something was a little off about him.”

“Huh,” is all Clint says, but he sits rather suddenly and heavily in the chair across from Tony, and holds out his hand, palm up, as he stares off into space. “Guess that would explain it. Shit, that would explain a _lot.”_

“Such as?”

Clint's eyes focus with frightening speed. “Jack Flag is dead,” he says. “Something went completely tits up on a mission he and Free Spirit were running with Cap in Bagalia. He ended up in a coma, and never came out.”

Clint's still got his hand out, so Tony puts the thirty-seven in it, and watches it disappear into Clint's pocket. “Bagalia is a tough town,” he says, putting his wallet away. “Awful as it is to say, sometimes bad shit happens.”

Clint shakes his head. “It wasn't _that_ it happened that bothered me, Tony,” he says. “It was how Rogers _acted_ about it. I told myself I was imagining things, but now…” He sighs, grimaces. “How certain are you about this Hydra thing, Stark? Where's your intel coming from?”

 ** _Rogers’s own head,_** he projects, and smirks broadly at the brief flare of panic that crosses Clint's face. “Don't worry, Barton,” he says aloud. “I won't tell anyone what's in your spank bank.”

 _“Greeaaat,”_ Clint says, dry and drawling. “Cos _that's_ a power-up you needed: telepathy. Why is it you always manage to come out smelling at least a little like roses no matter how much shit someone tries to drown you in?”

“Some people get hawk vision. Some people get the luck of a bad penny.” There’s something else crawling over Clint’s thoughts, something sick and ugly and dark, and Tony desperately tries to pull free before he can see what it is. But it’s too late, and the guilt and self-loathing of Clint’s part in Bruce Banner’s death smashes into him like a gut punch. “Jesus, Barton,” he says, wiping beads of sudden sweat off his forehead with a shaky hand. “How are you living with that?”

To his credit, Clint doesn’t try to play coy or dumb, just eyes Tony steadily. “As best I can,” he says. “Gonna yell at me some more about it?”

Tony closes his eyes, hears the sickening impact of the arrow into the back of Banner’s skull again, heroically chokes back the urge to vomit. “No,” he says, strangled. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Bright, jagged surprise laces through Clint’s thoughts, and Tony finishes extricating himself from Clint’s head. “That’s not what you said before.”

“Yeah well, I was wrong,” Tony says, and swallows hard. Pulls back into the relative silence of his own brain. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Who’s then?” Anger, defiance, challenge. Self-hatred. Shame. _Oh god, how does he live with himself?_

Tony opens his eyes and meets Clint’s stricken expression with a steady look. “It was Bruce’s,” he says simply, and pretends not to notice when Clint’s face crumples into grief. “I’m sorry he put you in that position, and I’m sorry I blamed you. I was wrong. It’s not your fault. It’s his.”

Clint's head goes down, and the plastic of the water bottle crackles in his white-knuckled hand. He sucks in a single shuddering breath and lets it out in a rush. “Coming from you…” he says, and shakes his head.

“It means almost nothing?” Tony says lightly, tries not to let it sting as much as it does.

“No. It means a hell of a lot.” Clint lifts his head, finishes his water, watches Tony the whole time. “You need a place to crash?”

Tony swallows past the ball of gratitude and assorted other feelings lodged in his throat. “Couldn't hurt,” he says. “The harder it is for Steve to find me, the longer we have to figure out what the fuck to do about him. You sure you can stand having me around, birdbrain?”

Clint smirks, sudden and sharp. “Bird Squad looks after its fledglings, Stark. Owl take you under my wing. Just try not to ruffle any feathers while you're in my nest. I'm tired of ducking the un-emused’s punches.”

Tony's smile is so bright, it hurts his face. “Toucan play at this game,” he says. “But I find myself desperately egretting every life choice that led me to this moment.”

“Tony,” Clint says with a broad smile, clutching at his throat in exaggerated joy. “We all knew you'd snap one day, but I'm so _honored_ to be the one that finally broke you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fragments of Steve's monologue Tony catches are lifted from _Civil War II: The Oath_


	4. Chapter 4

**oOoOoOo**

_Clint’s Apartment_

It takes half a day before Tony remembers why he hates living with other people.

He has to tell the story over and over again, not because Clint doesn’t believe him, but because Clint swears it’s more entertaining than anything on the pay-per-view. The first time he brings out popcorn, Tony declares that he’s not going to talk to Clint again. Clint bets him he can’t last an hour.

Fifty three maddening moments of silence later, Tony pays Clint his ten bucks.

Based on Tony’s encounter with Steve, and the foggy memory he has of waking up, Clint calls in Kate Bishop, the Other Hawkeye, and Tony dutifully answers all her questions, and then the archers disappear somewhere for two days, leaving Tony to fend for himself.

They return banged to hell and freshly bandaged, but smug and self-satisfied as they both dump a double handful of thumb drives on the table in front of him. He arches an eyebrow, hastily covering his coffee when it looks like one’s going to take a dunk in his brew, and then gingerly pushes it out of range of the cup. “Am I going to see a story in the papers tomorrow about two mysterious Robin Hoods who robbed from the Staples to give to the billionaire?”

“Nah,” Kate says, and steals his last slice of pizza out of the two-day-old box, makes a face after the first bite, mumbles something unintelligible around her mouthful, and then eats the rest of the slice. “We,” she says, still chewing, “took a trip to the Iliad offsite storage facility and raided their server farms. There’s probably a lot of worthless junk in there, but you went looking for information, right?” At Tony’s slow, wary nod, she grins, pushes her sunglasses to the top of her head and spreads both hands above the bounty of jump drives. “I give you data.”

“We,” Clint corrects. “ _We_ give you data.”

“Fine,” Kate says. _“We_ give you data.”

Tony eyes the pile of drives, eyes them, eyes the drives again. “So you have,” he says, and uses a finger to stir the various sized drives, eyeing them critically. “Do me another favor and go raid Stark Enterprises while you’re at it. I need better gear than Clint’s sorry-ass laptop if I’m going to do anything with this.”

\----

Once they return with the list of equipment Tony gave them to liberate, and Tony’s set up a makeshift workshop in Clint’s spare bedroom, data is sifted, sorted, streamlined, sourced and sequenced (and occasionally supplemented with more midnight archer raids for more miscellaneous storage devices).

The picture draws slowly together, and Tony’s blood grows a little colder with every new piece they uncover, every new tidbit of information that gets placed in its appropriate spot. But when everything finally gets put together and the image resolves into a clear projection, none of them much like what they see.

“This is way bigger than I thought it would be,” Tony says, eyes roaming worriedly over the flickering, holo-blue images displayed in the air. Timelines, correlations, theories, corroborating events, individuals… It’s a very disturbing picture.

“Yeah,” Clint says pensively, then catches Tony’s eye and gives him a very significant look. “You know you gotta take this to her now.”

It takes Tony a second, but he groans and sags. “Hell no, birdbrain. The only thing she’s interested in meeting me for is probably punching me in the teeth again. I missed her birthday because I was comatose. That’ll probably be reason enough for her.”

Clint shrugs, and there’s no sympathy, empathy or pity anywhere in his eyes. “Buy her a really big gift, say you’re sorry, and suck it up, princess. We’re not getting anywhere with this if we don’t get her on board.”

Tony throws up his hands. “Fine. Whatever you say, Barton. Fair warning though. If I end up in a coma again, or worse, I’m haunting your ass for eternity.”

**oOoOoOo**

_Carol Danvers’ Apartment_

“I am not at all sure about this, Barton,” Tony mutters, then readjusts his grip on the enormous stuffed rabbit to reach past it and ring the doorbell, and battles the urge to hide behind it as he senses Carol approaching. He chances a quick scan, catches a flash of her toweling her hair dry as she thinks about how she’s going to need to finally decide if she’s growing it out again or keeping it short, and rolls his eyes behind his sunglasses. “Never mind. The most pressing thing demanding her attention is her current hairstyle.”

“Anyone ever tell you it’s not nice to go peeping into other people’s heads, Tony?” Clint’s voice is only slightly tinny in his earpiece, and incredibly amused. Tony’s starting to regret playing into Clint’s punnery, because it’s been _days_ without any signs of slowing down, but Tony can’t bring himself to quit now.

“Only way she’ll know is if you go stool pigeon on me,” he mutters, then pastes on his very best smile as the door starts to open. “You got my back if she tries to punch me back into the coma, right?”

“Yes, I got your back, you chicken.”

Before he can reply with another terrible bird-related one-liner, the door opens and he’s face to face with Carol Danvers for the first time since he was yelling at her about self-fulfilling prophecies and Miles Morales, since she was doing her best to put her fist through his skull.

“Hey Carol,” he says with his best, brightest and smarmiest smile. “Long time no see. How's the career? Sorry I missed your birthday, here's a giant rabbit. Mind if I come in? Thanks.”

He breezes past her, pushing the rabbit into her arms and heading for the living room where, if he remembers correctly, there are floor to ceiling windows. He wants open air to be a pane of glass away if Carol decides she's still angry.

A flash of premonition warns him, and he spins on a heel, graceful and inhumanly fast, and catches Carol's wrist, halting a hand glowing with radiant energy inches above his shoulder. He eyes it, then arches an eyebrow at her, finding that he's not surprised in the slightest. “Carol,” he chides. “Is that really how you want to play this out?”

Her eyes flick to his hand on her wrist, then back to his face. Suspicion paints her face in lines hard and dark, and he grunts a little as the pressure increases against his restraining hand. “Steve warned me you might approach me with some cockamamie story,” she says, and her eyes narrow. “You destroyed a Helicarrier, Stark. God knows how many lives were lost. Do you have anything to say before I take you in?”

The memory of Rhodey’s funeral flashes through his mind again. Sobbing over his body. Fighting in his armor at the end of it all, because no one would ever fight in it again. And _rage_ chokes him, flares bright and hot in blue fire along his limbs, and his street clothing melts into the Phoenix armor. “What the hell is _with_ you?” he snarls. “Everything’s a fight. Everything’s your way or no way. Someone needs to haul that stick out of your ass before it becomes the pike displaying your goddamn head to the barbarians at the gates, Danvers.”

Carol jerks her arm free, and her eyes are huge as she takes a step back and looks him over. “So it's true,” she says accusingly, and in her voice there's a hollow note, maybe tinged with fear, sorrow, hard to tell anymore with her.

“Many things are true,” Tony replies as pleasantly as he can through gritted teeth. “Might I inquire which of these things you could possibly be referencing?”

“Don't play coy, Tony,” she snaps, and _great_ , now she's glowing too. “You're hosting the Phoenix Force. You know what kind of threat that makes you.”

“And we all know what happened the last time you relied on threat assessments, don't we?”

He'd forgotten he was capable of such venom, but he's abruptly reminded when Carol reels back like he socked her in the jaw, eyes impossibly big in pain and grief. This is escalating quickly. Too quickly for sanity or safety. It's nearly too much effort, but he closes his eyes and forces himself to calm down. To _power_ down, before it escalates past salvaging.

The only thing that makes it possible, he thinks as the flames die away and his jeans and tee return from the aether, is that he knows in his heart it's what Rhodey would tell him to do.

“Look,” he says tiredly, and turns away from Carol to stare out the window, one forearm supporting his lean against the glass, “I'm just here to talk, Carol. You wanna fight, we can do that. You can go all pissed off war goddess, I can go all pissed off cosmic firebird. We slug it out, set some streets on fire, break a few buildings, ruin a few hundred lives. Or we can just fucking _talk.”_ He shoots her a pointed look over his shoulder. “I know which one Rhodey would tell me is the smarter of the two options. So that's the one I'm hoping we can agree is the right choice.”

It doesn’t feel like much of a victory, but he takes it anyway when Carol’s shoulders slump, her glow fades, and she joins him at the window. “I don’t know if I can trust you,” she says, but all the belligerence, all the fight, has gone out of her voice.

He snorts. “You don’t need to. All I’m asking is that you listen to what I have to say.”

She takes a long breath, and then another. She nods without raising her head. “Okay, Tony. I can’t say I’m going to believe whatever it is you’re going to tell me, but I’m listening.”

“On my way in,” Clint says quietly and the earpiece clicks off.

“Carol, I can almost guarantee you won’t believe a word,” Tony says cheerfully. “But just remember, that isn’t going to make it less true.”

**\-----**

_“I am going to destroy everything you ever built. I am going to tear down these institutions that you've used to give yourselves power. I'm going to reduce all that you worked for, all you bled for, to a pile of rubble and ash — and from it I am going to make something better. I am going to make this a stronger world, one forged from fire.”_

It’s no less disturbing a speech the millionth time he’s heard it, but Tony’s barely been paying attention. All of his focus is on Carol’s face, watching her reactions as her expression shifts from skeptical to disbelieving and straight into horrified, where it stays for the duration of the stitched-together clips of Kobik hovering over Tony's coma pod, Steve's frequent visits, the final damning monologue.

In the silence that follows the smug _hail Hydra_ that ends the video, Clint reaches out and ejects the thumb drive from Carol’s laptop, rattles it in his hand with an expression so neutral and unreadable, it might have been carved from stone.

“My god,” Carol breathes, and wipes a hand slowly down her face. “I don’t know what to believe, Tony. I don’t want to believe _this —”_ She gestures sharply at the monitor now displaying a bouncing SHIELD logo screensaver, and shakes her head again. She pushes abruptly away from the table, and Tony turns to watch her pace into the living room area and back again. “I want to believe it’s bullshit.”

Tony does his very best to not let his irritation _or_ his hurt show in his voice or face, but he’s probably failing miserably. “Well, it isn’t.”

She slams both hands into her table, leans forward to loom over him. “How do I know you haven’t already been corrupted by the Phoenix, Tony?”

“Thumb drive,” Clint cuts in helpfully, sliding it towards her. “I pulled it all off the Helicarrier servers myself, Carol. Scans of the Phoenix Five, scans of Tony before _and_ after the coma. Also, my word on it.” His face flickers for a moment. “It was good enough for you when I killed Banner. Should be good enough now.”

“How do I know you haven’t been compromised?” Carol mutters, but takes the drive off the table.

“For fuck’s sake, Carol,” Tony snaps, crosses his arms over his chest, pins her with a hard, nonplussed stare. “What's the likelier scenario: that I've gone one thousand percent batshit and masterminded this ridiculously elaborate ruse just to lure you somewhere I can get you alone and vulnerable before I take my revenge on you and all this Phoenix stuff is just a really convenient coincidence, or that a cosmic entity with the brain of a kindergartener and the power of an Infinity Stone fucked around with Captain America's personal timeline to turn him into a Hydra stooge and all this Phoenix stuff is just a really convenient coincidence?”

Now that it's out of his mouth, it once again occurs to him how fucked up and strange their lives are that either scenario is counted as plausible at all, let alone which is _more_ likely. Sad facts that are only further reinforced when Carol sighs, sinks heavily into a chair and puts her face in both hands. “You’re right,” she says tiredly. “Elaborate ruses like this really aren’t your style.”

“Occam’s Razor,” Tony murmurs, though not without some sympathy. “When you remove the impossible, whatever’s left, no matter how improbable, has to be the truth.”

“How does this even happen?” Carol stares at the thumb drive in her hand. “How do we fix it?”

Tony glances at Clint, and Clint just shrugs at him, with a tiny smile as if to say _this is your circus and your monkeys, Stark._ Or maybe that’s his actual thought that Tony’s picking up. Either way, he gets the message. He’s the leader here, not Clint.

**_Thanks for the support,_ ** he thinks sourly, and Clint’s grin widens into a smirk.  

“That’s the tricky part, Carol,” he says with a sigh, “because it requires you to trust me and my shiny new Phoenix-like abilities. Right now, there’s a Cosmic Cube-powered little girl who thinks Hydra is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and you don’t have anything up your sleeve that can _begin_ to counter whatever she might do. Except me. You need to trust me, and you need to trust that I know what I’m doing. Steve's still in there. I know he is. We just have to get him back.”

Carol’s quiet for a long time, longer than Tony thought she would be, staring at the thumb drive as she flips it over and over in her fingers. “ _Do_ you know what you’re doing?” she finally asks, and glances up at Tony.

“Honestly?” He shrugs. “I don’t know, Carol. If you want guarantees, I can’t give them. You want assurances I can handle all the new shit I can do? Fuck, I’ve been awake for two weeks. I can't give those either. All I can do is ask you to have faith in me. Because Steve needs you to, and Rhodey would want you to.” He swallows, hard, and isn’t sure he’s going to like the answer to his next question. “Think you can do that?”

Carol shakes her head slowly, but her eyes don’t leave Tony’s. “Honestly?” She shrugs. “I don’t know, Tony. But I’ll try.”

**oOoOoOo**

_Avengers Mansion_

Tony slumps in his chair, massaging the bridge of his nose with one hand, and wondering if he’s got time to pop by Xavier’s mansion, or Genosha, or the Savage Land, or Attilan, or _somewhere_ with resident telepaths and beg for a quick lesson on how to keep a crowd of obnoxiously loud broadcasters from stomping all over his mental personal space. Or even just maybe how to turn it _off_ when he needs some goddamn quiet. Experience with Extremis and electronic white noise only goes so far in his self-taught psychic shielding, after all, and so many thoughts screaming at him in the awkward physical silence is giving him a migraine the size of Reed Richards' ego.  

It’s so _loud_ in here, all the things they want to say but never will, all the blame they want to throw, all the apologies they want to make. Christ, he’s choking on their pride and their stubbornness, and it’s just making his headache so much worse.

**_Could everybody shut up and start talking to each other like normal fucking adults, please?_ **

He knows without looking up that everyone’s staring at him now, because the cacophony in his head goes suddenly dim and dull. “Thank you,” he mutters, and squeezes his eyes more tightly shut. “Avengers on one side, Ultimates on the other. When did my mansion turn into a junior high dance in the gymnasium?”

“I think it’s always been a bit like high school,” Spider-Man, the grown-up one, says from where he’s hanging upside down from the ceiling. “It’s all awkward side-glances and panic attacks at the thought of asking someone to dance.”

This is such a bad idea. Why did he agree to this again? Right, because Steve has SHIELD and Hydra and God knows what else at his back. “Okay, now someone who isn’t Parker say something before that’s the line we close out this war planning session on.”

“Yeah, I have something,” Peter Quill says, raising his hand from his spot by the window. He side-eyes Tony and raises a palm in skeptic question. “Are we actually buying this? Cap as a Hydra agent? Come on, I could think up a better ridiculous story after a night drinking with Thor. In Asgard.”

“Thou art only half human, Quill,” Thor murmurs, but her smile is broad and her eyes are sparkling. “Methinks thy otherworldly heritage wouldst grant thee some advantage in retaining what scant wits thou art gifted.”

“Probably,” Quill says with a smirk, and Tony smirks himself a second later when suspicion crosses Quill’s face. “You know what, I think you just insulted me.”

“Surely not I,” Thor says innocently, and laughs at Quill's squawk of indignation.

Carol rises to her feet and clears her throat. “I've seen the footage,” she says, all firm and no-nonsense. “Stark’s telling the truth. Somehow or another, Kobik got it into her head that Hydra is what makes the world perfect, and God only knows how many people she's compromised in her pursuit of that reality.”

The mutants in the bunch have been giving Tony a wide berth since their arrival, but Erik Lehnsherr stands and moves out of the cluster of the in the opposite corner from the Guardians, stopping just shy of standing beside the chair in which Tony is slouched. “As much as you prefer to believe otherwise, Captain Danvers,” he says, folding his arms and choosing to split his glaring time between her and Tony, “you are just as susceptible to jumping to the wrong conclusions as anyone else. You’ve been wrong before. What assurances do any of us have that Stark is not another Dark Phoenix? Another Ulysses Cain?”

“You don’t,” Tony snaps, and his headache spikes again as loud, belligerent thoughts crash like tidal waves against his laughable mental shields. Fucking hell, how do telepaths _live_ with this much bullshit floating around in their heads? He grimaces and grinds his fingers into his temples, wishing he could just reach in and claw the pain out. At this point, he thinks, he might swear his allegiance to Hydra just to make it _stop_.

“You do have a habit of feuding with Cap,” Peter, who abandons hanging upside down to crouch on the wall near Tony’s chair, says reluctantly. “And you were in a coma for an awfully long time, Tony. It would be easy to get things confused, even without something like the Phoenix Force invading your system.”

Tony grinds his teeth together. “For the last time,” he says with exaggerated patience. “Scans have been provided for you all to look over. If you do this very simple thing, we could put this Phoenix bullshit to rest once and for all. I _was_ a Phoenix host for a very tiny portion of the Force. I was _barely_ a host. And I no longer am, because Extremis did its job and killed the infecting entity before it could affect me.”

“Which explains the telepathy and the flight without the suit and the bursting into flames, I’m sure,” Quill says, sharp and caustic. “How stupid do you think we are, Stark?”

Tony bites his tongue. He bites his tongue _really, really_ hard, because he’s trying here, really trying, to not piss anyone off, to be a team player, to get them moving in the right direction for the right reasons. He absolutely is not going to take the broad and blatant opening Quill just left for him. He absolutely is _not._

Thankfully, he has Clint to do that for him.

“I don’t think we have the time necessary to devote to telling you just how stupid we think you are, Star-Lord,” Clint says with a smirk, lounging in a chair near Tony and twirling an arrow between his fingers. “We could try, but I think we’re on something of a clock here, what with Nazi Cap running amok and all. Raincheck?”

“Barton,” Carol says with a warning undertone, as Quill bristles defensively and Kate breaks into laughter. “Knock it off.”

“Sure thing, boss,” Clint says easily, and glances sideways with another smirk at Tony, tipping two fingers in his direction.

“Best I can figure,” Tony says, after he heroically swallows his laughter and manages to find a somewhat diplomatic tone and his prepared _dumbed down for the non-scientists_ rationale, “when Extremis neutralized the Phoenix infection, it created antibodies against it which have the nifty side effect of mimicking the abilities the Phoenix gives its hosts. Which you would know, if you’d done the suggested reading.”

Thor looks troubled, and Tony sighs, because if there’s one person he thought he’d have to work the least on convincing, it was her. “It is difficult to believe,” she says doubtfully, cupping her chin pensively in one hand. “I have seen many an oddity not easily explained, friend Stark, but this stretches credulity, possibly to the breaking point.”

He sighs and closes his eyes, because the voices clamoring against his skull are pitching upwards in volume again. “What,” he asks, once again through gritted teeth, “would you possibly accept from me that might at least make you _think_ about the possibility that what I’m telling you is true?”

The throbbing surges up to a tortuous rhythm, and he just barely manages to not double over in pain. Between the discordant thoughts battering at his mind and the strident voices battering at his ears, he can’t make out a single fucking thing anyone is saying.

Until he hears, very clearly, Parker say, “Cap’s usually right, at least a little. Our community has been through too much in the last few years. We need to hear his side before we can make any decisions.”

The murmurs of agreement, the muttered “Cap’s side is usually the one to be on”, bring his attention fully back to the room. He jerks his head up, narrowing his eyes at the brief, barely-there flash of blue he catches gleaming in the space above their heads.

Of fucking course. Subtle, but he should have seen it coming. He really should have.

He doesn't hesitate, just launches himself out of the chair and hovers midair, clothing shifting into his Phoenix armor, blue flames licking around his wrists and ankles. A moment before his head goes blessedly, blissfully silent, all the angry, grumbling thoughts shift to confusion or frustration or surprise.

Except for the one that goes to _fear._

“Alright, kid,” Tony says firmly, and his hands clench into burning fists. “Playtime is over.”

Below him, the two Hawkeyes are pulling their bows, already scanning for hostiles, and Carol is tense but uncertain. The rest are milling, disgruntled and impatient, but now he knows what he’s looking for. His blast, blue fire from his palm the same way he’d fire a repulsor, is a split second ahead of Clint’s arrow, and he’s not sure if Clint saw what Tony did, or if he just reacted with trust in Tony’s judgement. Either way, Tony feels a surge of vindication swell tight and hot through him as Kobik squeaks, flickering into sight as she dodges both arrow and firebolt.

“You’re ruining everything again, Tony!” she yells, her face scrunched in fury and her hands on her hips. “You all like Stevie! You all trust him! You should be his friends now and do what he wants you to do.”

Tony shakes his head slowly, and despite himself, his heart really goes out to her. Despite her mind-bogglingly immense power potential, Kobik’s a kid, and a very young one at that. He isn’t going to allow her to run rampant over anyone’s free will anymore, but that doesn’t change his certainty that she really doesn’t know what she’s doing with any level of consequence.

“This isn’t the way, kid,” he says, a little sadly, as he’s joined in the air by Carol, Lehnsherr, Thor, a handful of other fliers. “You can’t _make_ someone do something by changing their minds for them, Kobik. That’s not what friends do.”

“Is too!” she retorts, and sticks her tongue out at Tony as she flashes her hands into the air, sending blue sparks everywhere. “You do it like this!”

“Hail Hydra,” Carol whispers in his ear, and that’s the only warning he has before her fist impacts the back of his head.

He hits the far wall, and is a little surprised to find that hurts worse than Carol’s casual punch. “Ow,” he groans, puts a hand to his head and turns to squint back at Carol. “Oh hell,” he groans in a completely different way, because every single one of them are staring back at him with eyes gone bright, unnatural, poisonous blue.

“They’re my friends,” Kobik says spitefully. “They like me. Steve likes me. You should like me too, Tony. Steve wants you to like me.”

“Steve wants you to like her,” Carol says, drifts closer towards him.

“Steven desires thy friendship, Stark,” Thor adds.

“Be Steve’s friend, Tony,” Clint says tonelessly, from just under his feet.

“Be all of our friend, Stark,” Quill says from somewhere behind him.

“Be Kobik’s friend,” Parker intones, upside down on the ceiling to the left.

It’s _chilling_ how slack and lifeless their faces are, like lights are on but no one’s home. Or, he thinks grimly, as the warmth of his flames washes upwards, chasing the chill away, like the owners are home, but are tied up in the attic, screaming into their gags.  

“Pass,” he says, and Kobik’s face goes dark and glowering. It’s a gamble, and a very risky one at that, but he ignores the army of cosmic-cube puppets and wills the fires to burn brighter, hotter. “What you’re offering isn’t friendship, but enslavement.”

Before she can do anything but glare and open her mouth, the shrieking groan of stressed metal makes Tony turn his head, and he yelps in reflex, dodging out of the way as the refrigerator flies out of the kitchen through the wall, and crashes into Kobik. Like a pissed-off storm deity, Lehnsherr floats into the air behind it, arms crossed intimidatingly.

“Erik?” Tony croaks, because his eyes are not any shade of blue but his own natural color.

“Serve Hydra?” Lehnsherr shakes his head and sneers. “Not in this reality, little girl. Not in _any_ reality.”

In hindsight, he really should have expected Magneto, of all people, to violently recoil from unnatural influence to serve an organization founded on the same principles and by the same general people that founded the Nazis.

Clearly, the same thought never occurred to Kobik, who shoves the fridge off her with a wail of dismay. “You’re all so mean!” she shrieks up at them. “I’m leaving, and I’m taking my new friends with me!”

“That’s where I have to put my foot down, sweetheart,” Tony says, and takes a deep breath because he’s not sure at all if he can do this, but fuck it, he has to do something before she walks out of the Mansion with the entirety of his team under her spell. “Let ‘em all go, now, or you’re grounded, young lady.”

Kobik whirls, her pigtails flying, and power all but crackling off her limbs and hair.  “You’re not my Daddy!”

“I am not,” Tony agrees easily, squints hard at the flash of blue above Carol’s head as she makes a dash for him, and crosses his fingers that his impulse to grab whatever’s there and turn it to ash is the correct one.

The fires go practically silver-white in their heat, and he grunts, strangled and pained, as Carol’s arms close around him with enough force to dent the Iron Man armor, were he wearing it. But Kobik yells in sudden shock and pain, charring lines fade into being above the mob’s collective heads, and sift into ash that disappears as quickly as it showed up.

It’s creepy as _all fuck_ , the way everyone just drops like someone flipped a switch, but he’ll take it as the preferred alternative to being Kobik’s Real Life Dolls. Kobik herself trembles and stares at Tony with liquid eyes and a quivering lower lip, then wails again like a kid with a broken toy and vanishes.

Tony slumps back down to the ground, rubbing his temples in tired, concentric circles as he lets his flames die down again. Unexpectedly, a hand settles on his shoulder, and he jerks his head up, swinging around in startlement to meet the approving, satisfied gaze of Magneto himself. Tony’s not sure if that should humble him, impress him, terrify him, or all three at the same time.

Quill is the first to stir and groan, sitting up in what looks to be some discomfort, but one by one, they all follow suit until they’re blinking in dazed shock and rubbing temple, necks, foreheads, throats. And Tony stands, tense as an overcoiled spring, too tense to relax enough for his armor with its fucking Phoenix emblem to go away and return his jeans and tee and sneakers, as they all turn their eyes to him.

After a long moment of strained silence, broken only by the shuffle of Clint and Kate and Carol picking themselves up and moving to stand near Lehnsherr behind Tony, Peter Quill exhales shakily, manages to get himself back on his feet and squares his shoulders.

“Okay,” he says, and pushes his hands through his hair. His voice is shaking just a little, but Tony’s not going to be the one who mentions it. “I believe you, Stark. What do you need us to do?”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And done! Jesus Christ, this thing ate a significant chunk of my life in so many good, fun ways.
> 
> Edit: The art has now been embedded in Chapter 1 and in Chapter 5, where they belong. : )

**oOoOoOo**

_Helicarrier Iliad_

They’re really doing this.

There are at least three dozen people in various states of approaching the Helicarrier _Iliad._ The Hawkeyes have commandeered an Avengers quinjet, the Guardians another. Both cargo holds are packed full of mutants and altered humans and normal people who are just _really fucking good_ at what they do. Fliers are in the air, carrying teammates and friends and allies as best they can.

They’re doing this. Really, really doing this. And despite having been the driving force behind it all happening, Tony’s still finding it hard to believe that once again, superheroes and various powers are gathering to go to war against their own.

Tony’s flying alone, and it feels bizarre without the armor encasing him. Once again, he’s given a wide berth, but at least now he’s feeling it might be because the raptor anima around him is kind of big and kind of burning. It’s a silly, stupid thought, but he wonders if any other fire-based fliers have ever had people steer clear of their flight paths. He should ask Johnny Storm, next time he sees him.

“Any last minute instructions you wanna give out, Tony?” It’s Clint in his ear, all casual and nonchalant, like they’re not flying into the maw of Hydra hell to pick a fight. “You’ve been a little light on the details. Maybe blame that on the ungodly powerful four-year-old who crashed our war meeting, but this seems like a good time to let everyone in on what you want them to do.”

Tony rolls over, flying with his back to the wind for a moment, and smirks at the Hawkeyes’ quinjet. Kate tips him a merry wave through the windshield, and he returns the salute. “I’m not going to try and micromanage,” Tony says, and hears someone, Quill maybe, snort across the comm channel in disbelief. “Shut it, Star-Lord,” he says. “I have no details as to what we’re walking into here. Flying into. Whatever. The entire Helicarrier crew and SHIELD staff might have been co-opted by Kobik. It might be just Cap on board who’s a secret Nazi.”

“There are words,” Carol says, slightly strangled, and Tony looks to where she’s flying off to his left, “that should never, ever be uttered again.”

“Agreed,” Tony says with feeling, rolls back around so he’s streamlined once more. “Let’s make sure they never are.”

“So,” Kate says, after an awkward silence. “You want us shooting things and knocking down SHIELD agents and superhero types who might be compromised?”

“Pretty much, More Awesome Hawkeye.”

“Happy to kick you off Bird Squad as quickly as I signed you on,” Clint says cheerfully. “What are you planning on doing while we’re doing all the hard work?”

Tony closes his eyes for a moment, fights down the uncertainty and doubt, then sighs. “Making sure Kobik doesn’t start enlisting you all against your will,” he says quietly, and hears/feels/senses the semi-jovial mood in the army around him plummet into something darker and grimmer. “And making sure that Steve comes back to us, without all the crazy Nazi crap she stuffed in his head.”

“T’will be a glorious battle,” Thor says, and Tony can hear the determined smile in her tone. “Songs will be sung of the deeds done this day.”

“Let’s just hope they’re not dirges,” Quill mutters.

Tony has to laugh when a chorus of exasperated “ _shut up, Star-Lord”_ crackles from all comms on the channel.

\---------

To no one's surprise, least of all Tony's, the deck of the _Iliad_ bristles with heavily armed SHIELD troops who open fire on them the second they're in maximum range. They can't have any hope of getting more than a really lucky shot at this distance, but Tony's disgruntled when it does a fine job of breaking their formation as they dodge incoming projectiles.

“You’re wasting ammo, fuckwits!” Clint yells in savage glee as his quinjet, on Tony's ten o’clock, banks and rolls around something that looks suspiciously like a knockoff RT missile. “You're not going to hit shit at this distance! Who do you assclowns think you are, me?”

Tony eyes the deck still some distance away, which is filling up with even more SHIELD agents as he watches, and brings a hand to his ear to trigger his comm. “Our landing pad is getting awfully crowded,” he says across the channels. “Anyone feel like clearing a space?”

“Aye, Iron Phoenix,” Thor calls over her shoulder, voice loud enough to carry over without the comms, as she sails past him with Mjolnir extended.

“That’s not my name!” Tony calls helpfully back.

“Oh, it's totally your name now,” Kamala says in the sort of happy, bouncy tone that always makes Tony uneasy, because it usually means some new rabid corner of internet Avengers fans show up at the Mansion or the Tower in cosplay or with signs displaying their shipping preferences. “Don't worry, Tony. I'll make sure they know it's not a pairing name for you and Ms Grey. Or Mr. Summers either. Just leave it to me!”

“Anyone have any brain bleach?” Peter Parker asks after a long, awkward silence. “Cos that’s an image I need to burn out of my head as soon as possible.”

“Betcha Hydra isn’t looking so awful now, Tony,” Clint snickers.

“Focus people!” Carol snaps. “Now is not the time for this. Get your heads in the game, or turn around and go home before you get someone injured or killed.”

“Thank you, Captain Danvers,” Magneto says primly, and cuts an ominous and imposing figure as he descends like a god-emperor from the sky to begin tossing quinjets and metal-based weapons around the deck with negligent waves of his hand. A moment later, Thor lands to one side of him and Carol to the other, and Tony’s kind of impressed at how quickly they clear tarmac big enough for both quinjets to touch down and spill their passengers out into the fracas.

Tony hangs in the air above everyone, floating in a shifting cloud of amorphous fire,  stretching out with every sense he possesses -- technopathic, telepathic, physical, all of them at the same time -- and waits for Kobik to show herself.

He doesn’t have to wait long, and he doesn’t have to move at all to intercept her, because when she shimmers into sight, she’s right in front of him and glaring at with her hands on her hips. "Go away,” she says with a scowl. Stevie isn’t coming out to play today, Tony. You’re gonna try and take him away from me, but you can’t have him. He’s mine. And I’ll fight you if you try to take him.”

If she wasn’t so scary fucking powerful and more than a little unhinged, Tony would be utterly charmed by how adorable she is with her face scrunched up like that. “I’m not going to fight you, kid.”

Yes you will,” she says, spiteful and vicious. “I’ll _make_ you fight me. But first, I’ll make you fight all your friends.”

And she vanishes as quickly as she appeared and just as huffy.

“Eyes open,” he says into the comm, turning left and right and readying himself to move in any direction the second she reappears or one of his own turns on them. “Kobik’s here and in a snit. Watch your backs.”

“Understood,” half a dozen voices overlap in reply, and he starts to dive for the fire- and fistfight below, to be as close as possible for when Kobik reappears.

“Stark!”

He freezes mid-air as his name crackles through the comms. Kate's voice. He scans quickly until he spots her on the deck, waving up at him.

“Cap is here!” she says urgently, and he follows her vigorous pointing with his eyes, locks onto the bright, gleaming vibranium shield.

He finds himself smiling grimly, and adrenaline rushes into his veins, surging energy and alertness through him in anticipation of the fight. “So much for not letting Stevie out to play,” he mutters, and brings a hand to his ear. “Rogers is on the field. I've lost eyes on Kobik. Watch your backs and your brains, people. I'm going to be busy for a little while.”

“Deal with the Captain, Stark,” Magneto replies unexpectedly. Tony’s eyes flick to where he’s currently stripping thin plates from the bulkheads and sending them sliding left and right to block agents from creeping up behind a busy Thor and an equally busy Kamala Khan. “I may not be a cosmic entity, but I am more than capable of handling an unruly child.”

“Roger that.” He takes a deep breath, shakes out his hands and shoulders. “Okay,” he says, mostly to himself, but since he forgot to turn off the comms, also to everyone else. “Here we go.”

He drops into a dive, arms spread like repulsors are guiding him, attention focused on the blue and white and red of Steve's uniform, trusting anyone in his path who's on his side to get out of his way. As he drops parallel with the deck and levels into horizontal flight again, he gathers his telepathy like a fist and shoves it in a psychic punch at Steve a second before he impacts Steve’s side with his shoulder.

“You know something, Steve?” he says conversationally as he wraps his arms around Steve's waist, braces against the teeth-rattling crunch of hitting the world's most stubborn supersoldier like a wrecking ball, and only sheds a few involuntary tears of pain at the jolt ripping through his abused shoulder when he shears abruptly upward to carry them both to the secondary, mostly empty VIP deck. “I think you forgot to mention a few things the other day when I asked you to fill me in on the stuff I missed while I was asleep. Why don't we talk about that now?”

He’s already in Steve’s mind, already knows this was a trap. He doesn’t care as much as he should, because this trap works both ways. Just as much to his advantage as it is to Steve’s, maybe even more so. He only gets split seconds to read intent in Steve’s thoughts before they become actions, but Tony’s brain doesn’t need longer than split seconds to make all his calculations.

He lets Steve lock arms around him, jerk him off course, keep him steady and still with supersoldier strength. “You’re too predictable, Tony,” Steve says, and while there’s a great deal of triumph in his voice, triumph and malevolence, the edges of his thoughts are uncertain, hesitant, cautious, because Tony’s not reacting like Steve expected him to, and it’s throwing him off-balance. “I know you better than you know yourself.”

“Maybe,” Tony says, pulls his arms free. “But I’m not the only one who’s predictable here, Rogers. You’re missing the big picture, as usual.”

“And what big picture is that?”

**_Tony,_ ** whispers a faint, dim, thready voice deep in the darkest corners of Steve’s mind.

Tony smiles, opens his eyes, and settles his hands on either side of Steve’s face. “You begged me to wake up and try to stop you,” Tony says softly, and takes an immense amount of satisfaction in the way Steve’s eyes go wide and panicked. “And sweetheart, here I am, just like you asked for.”

He digs his fingers under the edge of the cowl, and lets the fire flare up in his veins, in his soul, lets it bloom brighter than the heart of a star. He barely knows what he’s doing here, isn’t sure he can actually make the Phoenix fire do what he wants it to on this complicated a level, but goddammit, he’s Tony Stark, and “impossible” is a word he only recognizes before he’s had his first cup of coffee.

“You know what the amazing thing is about the Phoenix Force, Steve?” he asks conversationally, and this time, it’s his grip that’s iron, keeping Steve locked in place, forcing him to his knees, even as Steve bucks and shoves, tries to break free. “It burns away what doesn’t work. It’s a cleansing force, a purifying agent of the universe. I think it’s absolutely fucking hilarious that out of all the people on the planet, _I_ ended up with it at the end of everything, but here we are. And you know what else? This Hydra Cap thing? _It’s so not working for me.”_

There are arrows flying past his head, and lightning bolts and laser beams, but Tony can’t spare any attention for them either. It’s taking everything he has to keep control of the flames screaming through his body, everything to keep Steve on his knees with the cowl falling behind his head, blue fire dancing in his eyes.

“You can’t have him back,” Steve spits, and cruelty paints his face in garish lines as he seizes Tony’s wrists with a grip hard enough to hurt. “Your Steve is gone, Stark. I’m all that’s left.”

Tony finds himself smiling in response, a slow, curving tilt to his mouth that is his patented Stark smirk, a thousand percent him through and through. “Okay,” he says easily, and pulls Steve to his feet as effortlessly as if he were lifting air. “I’m betting you’re wrong, but on the off-chance you’re right and there’s nothing left of the man I know? We’ll just have to burn together.”

The fire’s in his throat, dancing on his tongue, splashes from his smile, and he leans forward and presses his mouth to Steve’s, soft and sweet, and all the lasers and screams and arrows and war cries wash away in purifying blue-white flames.

\---

Everything is white and cold, and thick blue lines pulsate overhead, humming with a bone-jarring pitch that makes Tony’s back teeth ache. _Wrong,_ his instincts scream at him. _Everything is wrong._

He lets himself rise into the sky, until he can reach out and lay a hand on one of the cosmic-blue veins, and images of a very young, very small Steve flash past his closed eyelids. It would be tooth-rottingly adorable, if tiny Steve wasn't dressed in Junior Hydra clothing, helping his mother with her Nazi quilting bees. Instead of being charmed, Tony is horrified beyond all measure to see that broad, happy smile forming the words “Hail Hydra” without irony.

Rage chokes his throat, steals his breath, his sight. This will never be who Captain America is, not so long as Tony has the ability to do something about it. And he does.  

His hand snaps tight around the blue vein, and distantly, he hears Kobik cry out in shock and fear, but Tony's beyond caring, because _she's done things to Steve._

Purifying fire flares around his fingers, his hand, screams in absolute fury as it boils from his body, and the vein flash-burns into ash and cosmic dust.

_You aren't going to win this, Tony._ Kobik fades into sight, thin and tiny and chin tipped defiantly at him.   _He belongs to us now. You can cut one of the strings, but you won't get them all._

They flare into view, one by one, all around her, lacing the sky with streaks of bright, throbbing, ominous blue, too many to count. Too many to burn. He'll be years finding them all, years fighting a stalemate, because as quickly as he torches them, he knows Kobik will rebuild them. They crisscross the heavens above him, radiating out and looping around each other until white cold gleams with poison blue, until he’s surrounded in the miasma of it.

Kobik flickers and fades, moving closer to him. Holds out her hand. _Join us, Tony,_ she says, warm and tempting.  _He needs you. We need you. Come with us and you’ll never need to be alone again._

Just for a moment, he wavers, feels the crushing blue press tight around him. Because it’s an impossible task, to find Steve, to free him from this trap. Almost, he gives in. But he doesn’t, because he’s already seen the fatal flaw in Kobik’s web, already decided how he’s going to win this fight.

“Sorry, kid,” he says, and grins when he finds the vanishing point in the lines overhead. “As much fun as this has been, I have to see a star-spangled man about a plan.”

Kobik shrieks, fear, pain, temper tantrum, he isn’t sure. Doesn’t care, either, as he streaks towards that single, barely-there point where all the lines connect. Where they’ve been tied to a frozen figure, anchored in the ice keeping Steve, the _real_ Steve, locked away.

“Time to go, honeybunch,” he says, lays his hands on the surface of the ice, and reaches deep within himself, brings forth the fire, wills everything to **_burn._ **

Somewhere in the inferno, Steve’s fingers lace through his, and he leans in to rest his forehead against Tony's. And this time, there’s absolutely no uncertainty at all in Tony’s mind that _this_ is how Steve should feel, sound, look.

**_Found you,_ ** Tony says, and grins.

**_I knew you would,_** Steve replies with nothing but pure relief and absolute faith, and he holds Tony's hands tight in his own as Kobik’s lies turn to ash and stardust in the Phoenix fire surrounding them.

**oOoOoOo**

_Stark Tower_

Tony hears the disappointment in the Avengers’ thoughts long before anyone comes up to the roof to find him. Despite Steve’s intel on where the Red Skull had based his operations all this time, he somehow managed to get away yet again, leaving only an empty apartment behind.

Tony never expected him to do anything less. The others have been in various states of optimism since Steve returned from Cloud Cuckoo Land, but Tony's always a pragmatist. And he knows that Schmidt is a survivor through and through, and with a four year old cosmic entity thinking he's her daddy, well… Schmidt's plans, until they manage to separate Kobik from his influence, will be difficult to predict, let alone counter.

Unless people remember Tony and his new powers, of course.  

He's kind of hoping they don't, because sooner or later, someone's going to start questioning his trustworthiness and are they _really_ sure it's a good idea to leave the Phoenix embedded in him?

He sighs, glances over his shoulder at the still-closed door, sensing more than hearing Steve coming up the stairs in search of him. This is a conversation he'd be okay putting off indefinitely, but running from conversations with Steve has never worked out for him.  He waits until the door opens, and meets Steve's startled gaze with a smirk. “Hail Hydra,” he says, and turns back to the sunset.   

In the corner of his eye, he sees Steve scowl as he joins Tony at the rail. “Not funny, Tony.”

He shrugs, lets the smirk melt into a grin. “It’s a little funny. From a certain perspective.”

“Not from mine,” Steve says firmly. He eyes Tony for a moment, then turns to stare out over the city. “So, you're a Phoenix host,” he says lightly, and Tony's stomach clenches.

“In a manner of speaking,” Tony replies, then sighs. “It might be more accurate to say I _was_ a Phoenix host, but I'm not anymore. When I woke up—”

Steve gently cuts Tony off with a smile and an upraised palm. “Extremis rewrote it,” he says. “Carol told me. She also said the chances of you being compromised by whatever is left of the Phoenix are too great to brush off.”

Tony tries not to tense up, and fails miserably. “Good old Carol,” he says, more than a little bitter. “Beating me into a coma clearly didn't help her resolve her issues.” He sighs again. “Okay, Steve. Say she's not wrong, mostly because she isn't. What happens now?”

**_I want to know what you think._** It's so strong a thought, it takes Tony a few moments to realize Steve didn't verbalize it. He eyeballs Steve suspiciously, but all Steve does is smile gently at him, with the wind ruffling his hair. **_No trick, Tony.  I really just want to know what you think._**

“People say I never learn, Cap,” Tony says thoughtfully, eyes focused on the bright pastel smears of the sunset. “But I do. I really do. I’m not going to forget what happened to Summers and the others when the Phoenix Force took them over. I’m 95% sure what happened to them isn’t going to happen to me. The problem is that other pesky five percent. That’s where the chances of me going Darth Ferrous lie. So maybe don’t take me on faith, but at least give me a chance.”

“I think you've earned that much,” Steve says with a smile, leans against the railing and watches the sunset with Tony. “But I have all sorts of faith in you, Shellhead. You earned that too.”

He's sure he deserves none of it, but warmth and affection swell up, carrying humility and awe through Tony's chest, bubbles and pops until he thinks he might burst from it.

“He told me you loved me,” Tony says before he can think better of it, and Steve starts badly beside him. “Pod Person Rogers tried to twist the knife as deeply as he could get it, even though I couldn’t hear a damned thing he was saying. How you always held back because you loved me, even when we were trying to kill each other. How that made you weak, because you couldn’t do what needed to be done.”

Steve’s silent for a long time, and Tony watches him out of the corner of his eye, heart in his throat, waiting for Steve to angrily deny it all. But all Steve does is lean on the rail with his elbows, hands folded over each other in front of him, chewing on the corner of his lip as he stares off into the distance. Tony doesn’t need any of his telepathy to know what’s going through Steve’s mind either, and the corners of his mouth tilt hesitantly up.

“Maybe,” Steve eventually concedes, and straightens up to turn and lean back against the rail, hands wrapped loosely around the top bar on either side of him. Tony’s breath catches just a little, because Steve’s eyes are shockingly blue, and the golden-orange-scarlet hues of the sun backlight him until his hair and shoulders are almost glowing. Steve smiles ruefully, with just a hint of embarrassed grimace. “Probably. Is that going to be a problem?”

“Completely,” Tony deadpans. “You know me so well. I could never possibly reciprocate.” He turns to face Steve, tilts his head. “I know you were a little busy not being yourself, but you _did_ notice that I Prince Charming’ed your ass, right?”

If he didn’t know better, Tony’d swear Steve is giving him the once-over right now. “I noticed,” he murmurs, eyes fixated on Tony’s mouth.

Which, Tony is disgusted to realize, has gone dry as a desert. This is not happening, he tells himself firmly, doing his best to ignore his racing heart and the storm of anxiety suddenly fluttering in his stomach as he wipes his palms that are _not clammy at all_ on the denim of his jeans.

Steve’s eyes flick back up to his. “Are you sure I’m back to myself?” he asks, and there’s a moment of sheer panic at the thought that maybe Tony screwed something up when he was inside Steve’s head, because there’s no chance in hell normal Steve would sound that innocent with that gleam of interest in his eyes. He’s not _Tony,_ after all. “Maybe you should kiss me again, just to make sure.”

Tony blinks, blinks again, and then shakes his head sharply. “Clearly,” he says, combing through his neural pathways for his brain’s reboot button, “I wasn’t completely thorough when I burned the crazy out of your skull,” and Steve looms over him, smiling in that gorgeous _Steve_ way, and Tony’s mouth goes into overdrive, “and I probably ended up copying part of myself in there, had to, because— _”_

“Shut up, Tony,” Steve murmurs, and tilts his head down as a hand comes up to cradle the back of Tony’s head. “And just let me kiss you.”

“Okay,” Tony says, because what the fuck else is he going to say to that? _No, let me keep babbling to buy time to remember if I brushed my teeth after dinner?_ “If it’ll put your mind at ease, just to make sure there’s no more Nazi lurking in your brain.”

“Whatever you need to tell yourself, Tony,” Steve says, and is laughing as he presses his mouth to Tony’s, and then Tony’s done telling himself anything except _holy shit, this is actually happening._

There’s an uncommon tremor in his hands as he hesitantly lifts them to frame Steve’s face, tentatively brush through Steve’s hair. He’s dreamed of this, off and on from the time he was twelve and formed a desperate crush on that poster still on his wall back in the manor. He’s pushed this down time and again since they found Steve in the ice, because he’s never felt he could measure up to the kind of person Steve deserves, no matter how hard he tries.

If this is another dream, triggered by the desperate _we’re-dying-so-fuck-it_ kiss he laid on Steve the other day, he’s going to be _really pissed_ when he wakes up.

Steve makes a noise, shifts a leg, and hauls Tony into him more securely, and what’s left of Tony’s ability to think rationally vanishes under a deluge of Steve’s aggressively broadcasting train of thought: _what would he ever see in me—I’m just a poor kid from Brooklyn—have nothing to offer—out of my league—it’s just pity—he’s not interested—why would he be interested —I’m just Steve and he’s_ ** _Tony —_** _I’m too stubborn and he’s too smart —we fight and fight — I think he might hate me even when he doesn’t — I wish…_

“I can do that too,” Steve says, and brushes his thumb across Tony’s cheek, just under his eye. “None of it matters. Not now, not anymore. I’m tired of what ifs and regrets. Aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Tony says, and swallows hard, raises his eyes to meet Steve’s. “So very fucking tired of it.” Swallows again. Dares to caress over Steve’s cheek, feels a visceral thrill when Steve sighs contentedly, shuts his eyes, and leans into Tony’s touch. “Is this what we’re going to do about it, Steve?”

“You remember that Earth that avoided civil war Richards found? 3490?”

It’s such a change of gear, it takes Tony a second to follow. “The one where I was a woman and we got married?”

“That’s the one.” Steve’s back to smiling again. “Maybe we should take a page out of their book, see how that goes. I don’t want to fight with you anymore, Tony. It never leads anywhere good.”

And because he’s Tony, and he’s feeling on more solid ground now, he snorts. “If this is a proposal, Rogers, I’m just going to decline. I want to be wooed properly, with dinner dates and flowers and awkward looks in the hallway, before any ring goes anywhere near these fingers, and— _mmffph.”_

**_You’re not always going to be able to shut me up by kissing me,_** he thinks as his back hits the wall next to the door leading into the building, Steve’s weight keeping him supported while his hands roam under Tony’s shirt. **_I’m telepathic now too._**

Steve makes another noise, deep in his throat, and Tony is suddenly interested in figuring out how to make him sound like that again. **_I’m a determined sort of fella_ ** _,_ he hears Steve think back, and it’s really not fair of Steve to lick into Tony’s mouth like that. **_Pretty sure I can think of something to keep your mind occupied too._ **

**_I’m going to piss you off again_ ** _,_ he thinks, a last ditch effort as his shirt bids his chest farewell and disappears over Steve’s shoulder. **_I seem to have a talent for that._ **

Steve smiles against his mouth, both hands in his hair now. **_Way I understand it, that’s what hate sex is for._ **

Tony chokes and splutters, coughs until his lungs hurt, and squints at Steve through watery eyes. Steve’s laughing at him, bright and happy, lit up like a goddamn Christmas tree and as delighted as a kid finding the presents under it. “You’re not supposed to say things like that,” Tony croaks, clears his throat. “I think I missed a few things in your head if you’re saying things like that.”

“Stop overthinking it, Tony,” Steve says with a smile. “I’m betting you didn’t miss a thing. And even if you did? I’m okay with burning together.”

_Screw it,_ Tony tells himself, and stops fighting, gives in, decides that he’s okay with it too. He can try to tell himself otherwise, but this has been a long time coming, and even if this isn’t quite the reality he thought it would be once he got Steve back, it’s definitely one he can live with.

And that’s what he’s going to do.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't have done this without the encouragement, support and sharp beta cheerleader skills of Medie, JustAnotherPipeDream and SilverShadowKit, who kept me going, propped me up when I was down, and helped me dig myself out of plot holes and painted-in corners. Couldn't have done it without you.
> 
> And special thanks to state_line_of_texas, who tolerated my temporary abandonment of her promptfic verse for the sake of this beast with good humor. Cheers, doll. 
> 
> And Miko, gorgeous glorious Miko, whose artwork I literally leapt on the chance of writing for, once again. Much love! Looking forward to jumping on your art again next year, babe. :)

**Author's Note:**

> [KakushiMiko on DeviantArt](http://kakushimiko.deviantart.com/)


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